


When the Scorched of the Earth Come Back By Sea

by BecauseWhateverAtAll



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy Having A Mortal Life Crisis, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Everybody, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Internal Conflict, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Everybody, Protective Team, Quynh Hitting Them Where It Hurts (Metaphorically), Team Feels, Team as Family, the angsty fic will end with ridiculous fluff because i SAID SO, they are soft AND bamf because canon SAID SO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27871253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BecauseWhateverAtAll/pseuds/BecauseWhateverAtAll
Summary: What makes pit vipers unique is the fossa, which in effect give the snakes a sixth sense to help them find and perhaps even judge the measure of the prey on which they feed.It’s been four months since the kidnapping, the death-memory drugs, since going through more than one earth-shattering reunion. And they want to think that they’re stronger than ever as a team, as a family. But there’s always a weakness to exploit, when someone knows where to find it. When Quynh strikes again, she does it with precision. And venom.(Sequel toBy a Time to Rise and a Time to Fall)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 116
Kudos: 231





	1. Everyone's a Tendon, So Who You Gonna Chew?

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel, baby! I *think* you should probably read the first [story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25679185) if you haven't already, but who knows? I'm not a subtle writer. You might be able to pick up most of the context, I won't force you. But you could! Or not. Up to you.
> 
> Story title and all chapter titles are from the song "Phenom" by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down (which also happens to be, like, the best how-do-we-make-a-music-video-in-the-early-pandemic-days music video. Honest.)

  
He loved Joe at any time, at all times, in all ways, but there was something special about this. About the way he allowed himself to be with Nicky. _For_ Nicky. Nicky had been taught from the earliest of ages that strength and invulnerability were the same thing. He should have compassion, not passion, for humankind. That a man should always be in control of himself, and certain emotions would make him weak. That the only true love to be had in this life was what he offered to God. 

To think that someone would have such passion for _him_ , offer themselves to _him_... He’d been taught a lot of stupid things.

And so, he had learned better things. And he thanked God every day that he knew better now, that he had the purpose and mind of a better man. That he had _this_ family, _this_ calling, and _this_ man.

This man who was currently straddling his lap, leaning into him, both hands framing Nicky’s face with care. They kissed slowly, gently, content with the press of their lips parted just so. He slid his own hands from Joe’s knees up his thighs to his hips, held him there. Reveled in the warmth- physical, yes, Joe’s chest blanketing his own, but also just… just what Joe _radiated_ outwards. Warmth, love, adoration. He gave all of that, all that he was, to Nicky. Always and unequivocally.

It was one the reasons- one of the myriad reasons, one of the _infinite_ reasons- Nicky knew his love with Joe was real and destined. Because Joe never hesitated to offer all of himself, and Nicky never felt guilt at the taking. And vice versa. Because one _could_ exist without the other, but what would be the point?

“I realized- something- just now,” he murmured into the air between his mouth and Joe’s, slipping the words into the space between one kiss and the next, the moments of catching his breath.

“Hmm?” Joe wasn’t as interested in oxygen as he was, bringing Nicky’s face back impossibly closer, tilting the angle even more insistently, even more perfectly. His fingers were curled back behind Nicky's ears, idly mussing up and then smoothing down strands of hair.

“I realized,” he kissed him quick, once, twice, then pulled a few inches back, barely able to hold steady at Joe’s soft whine of protest. “That I love you more today than I did yesterday.”

Joe blinked, heady and fuzzy for a moment, before the words registered. Then that grand, crinkly smile spread across his face. “More than yesterday?”

“Yes,” he said, mock-serious. He kept one hand anchored to Joe’s hip, the other he ran up slowly, cupped his face, and guided him back in for another kiss. “I would’ve thought it impossible, but it’s true.”

Joe retaliated with the drag of his thumbs down both sides of his face, down his shoulders, down his sides. Like he was tracing his outline, memorizing it for a sketch later. For now, he filled between the lines by shifting his knees around Nicky’s thighs, widening his stance just enough to sink further into his lap. Once there he dropped a kiss or two, gentle-sloppy, along Nicky’s neck before resting his face there, just breathing. “Looking forward to tomorrow, then,” murmured into his skin.

Nicky could feel his own smile, the one he could never anticipate ahead of time or form on command, the one that just _appeared_ on his face because of Joe. He wrapped both arms tight around his back and shoulders, secured him in place right there. “I think your odds are very good.”

He trailed a hand down Joe’s spine as he felt him laugh, felt him mouth lazily at his collar bone and press a kiss through his shirt then begin a trail leading up to Nicky's mouth. Nicky slipped his hand under the hem of Joe’s own shirt, directly on the warm skin of his lower back, slowly running up again, dragging the fabric up with it, letting his other hand drift inward-

The sudden open and shut of the front door, footsteps, startled them both. Nicky instinctively began to reach for the nearest weapon (revolver under the left sofa cushion, and there was knife under the coffee table, he could get that to Joe), immediately alert- Nile and Andy had just left to go on a hike, shouldn’t be back yet, who the hell had found them out here-

Booker entered the living room with a few shopping bags, his eyes registering them both without a stutter to his stride, though he did the smallest of double takes at their positions, their hair in disarray and deep breathing, Joe’s shirt still half-rucked up his back. Nicky had the strangest urge to yank it back down, keep all the bared parts of him away from _anyone’s_ eyes, he didn’t care whose. And a just-as-strange urge to pull the shirt all the way off, be defiant and… and he didn’t know what he’d be defying. Strange.

Booker just nodded in greeting as he continued on into the hallway behind them. “Got some more ammo for the rifles,” he offered, his voice echoing off the walls as he walked upstairs. 

Joe let out the breath he’d unknowingly been holding, still tucked in against Nicky’s chest. “Okay, thank you,” he called after him, bringing his hands back up to twist idly into the neckline of Nicky’s shirt. He eyed him then, frowning a little. “Nicky?”

Nicky shook his head, forced himself to relax. “I- I forgot. I forgot he was...” It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but Nicky was still surprised whenever it did. It had been four months since Madrid, since Booker had rejoined the group, and sometimes his presence still managed to startle Nicky. Last year had been so transformative- Nile’s introduction, Andy’s mortality, Booker’s betrayal- it was like Nicky had recalibrated his brain to a new normal.

Now he didn’t quite know how re-recalibrate it into some other direction, factoring Booker back here, Quynh out there somewhere.

Joe smiled softly, splayed his long fingers against Nicky’s chest, holding him in place, grounding him. “It’s okay, you know that.” He tried to lean back to catch Nicky’s gaze, direct those way too sincere, way too convincing eyes Nicky’s way.

So Nicky just shook his head, drew Joe back against his chest and fixed his shirt- down, sadly, not off- before wrapping his arms tight around him. “It is right here, at least.”

Joe huffed a little, for the compliment or the deflection or both. But he said nothing, just breathed nice and slow, shifting to sit sideways across Nicky’s lap, looping his arms around Nicky’s neck and holding on in turn. 

They stayed there on the sofa, breathing, being, wound together, even when Nile and Andy returned from their hike and Booker made his way back down from the bedrooms. They stayed there while Booker and Nile got out a deck of playing cards- he was on lesson three of teaching her how to cheat at poker- and set up camp at the kitchen table. Andy grabbed a book and settled into the chair nearest the door, bypassing Joe and Nicky when they started to make room for her on the sofa. Ignored them, really. Completely. It had become her chosen, purposeful routine for the last month (whenever they actually managed to keep her in the house at all), and each day it wore on Nicky just a little bit more. His jaw ached some nights from how often he clenched it shut, gritted his teeth against saying something just to provoke her. She wasn't ready yet, he could see that, but worry and frustration were never a good combination for him.

But that was Andy, and right now Nicky wasn’t paying attention to that feeling, or even to the group as a whole. Not to avoid the new newness of Booker or Andy's short temper or Nile's pointed attempts to get everyone talking (she was wonderful, Nile, beyond amazing... but she hadn't yet learned and wouldn't for a century or two- some things with them just went beyond words), but- predictably, for sure- because of the person who most often commanded his attention. He held up a mental watch and counted, because he could now time this almost to the minute.

And there it was. Sometimes it was his elbows pulling in an inch closer to his sides, or his knees drawing up closer to shield some of his body. Tonight, it was his face turning to tuck more into Nicky’s neck. Inwards, away from the rest of the room.

It was a small thing, something it had taken Nicky weeks to notice. Joe was still so very much himself when he was alone with Nicky, but when he was around the others or anyone out in public, he became… less. His light dimmed just a fraction. Nicky didn’t know if the others noticed, as he was certain _Joe_ didn’t even realize he was doing it. But it was there.

He didn’t sprawl out as he used to on sofas or the floor, didn’t take up the same amount of space, preferring now to stay curled up wherever he was. Usually with Nicky on the sofa, in cars, huddling at the dinner table. With Nile when they watched her movies together. It wasn’t as though he was withdrawing from any of them, he still laughed and teased, smiled, hugged anyone who needed it. Still casually charmed café servers, shop clerks, neighborhood children, and Nicky. 

But there was a restraint there that hadn’t been there before. It was a hesitance before he spoke, before he smiled, a hanging back before he joined in with something. He was protecting himself. What happened with Quynh had left a mark that wasn't healed yet.

And it hurt Nicky’s heart to see. He had burned through his anger over the ordeal gradually, but the ache wouldn’t leave. This, of anything, was the worst scar from it. Not the nightmares or how Nicky sometimes caught him rubbing at the spot on his forearm where he'd been injected as though it still hurt, not the way he’d flinch away from any talk of Quynh. No, the worst was this. Joe battening down on his soul, depriving the world of something Nicky knew to be so good… depriving _himself_.

As the days went on, as he felt Joe tuck himself in closer and closer each day, he wanted to… no, Nicky couldn’t finish that thought. Didn't know how. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, that was what made this all so troubling. He wanted to _fix_ it, that’s what he was _good_ at. He was good at making Joe feel safe, and loved, and understood. 

And yet he also wanted to grab Joe by the shoulders, shake him, yell that he was better than this, he was better than whatever Quynh had become, someone who would willingly hurt her family. He wanted to remind Joe of things he himself had taught Nicky nearly a thousand years ago- that strength and invulnerability were _not_ the same thing.

Joe was stronger than this. And yes, Nicky had faith that he would recover, but he wasn’t now. He wasn’t better. He wasn't safe. And Nicky had no god-damned clue who he was really allowed to blame for it.

  
***

  
Booker’s psyche was glutton for punishment. Or the cynical half of him was glutton for the punishment of his optimistic half _(Half? How generous, S_ _éb_ _astien)_. And that cynical half sneered at him now, so disappointed that any aspect of him could have believed this was going to be an easy thing. Forgiven, forgotten, forgone conclusion.

No. He didn’t know why he was so surprised now, _still_ , after four months of this limbo, that things weren’t back to normal. Or whatever normal they ever used to have. Because he was back with the group, yes. But he wasn’t so sure he was back _in_ the group. Not yet. Once the endorphin high of rescues and reunions had worn off, a few weeks at most, things just slid right into… awkward. Off-balance. Strange. ‘Walking in on Joe and Nicky making out right there on the sofa for everyone to see’ strange.

Not combative, of course. That was important. There was no punishment from the others, no talk of atonement or revenge or anything so grand and uncomplicated. This was better and worse in the same breath. And a bitch to deal with sober.

Andy had always been the one he'd gravitated towards, gotten drunk with, and the one he'd missed most in his year apart. In all the time he’d known her, she’d been grieving, angry, tired, and it had fueled him, justified his own bitter view of the world. But now, while the anger was still there, there was this purpose and drive he’d never seen in her before, a belief in the work, and he didn’t know how to join with it yet. And now she was going through some shit of her own, and barely talking to any of them, and he wasn't sure who was going to explode over that first: her or Nile.

It wouldn't be the other two, he knew that. Joe and Nicky… they'd circled the wagons around each other. Still everyone's center and beating heart, but they'd built a little mental island for themselves lately, a flimsy but noticeably barrier around just them. Though it probably wasn’t that purposeful, really. It probably wasn’t _actually_ directed at Booker just to make him realize how much he’d missed out on. He knew they weren’t that spiteful or vindictive. It wasn’t even about him. After every dramatic, awful thing they’d gone through in the last year, they just weren’t taking each other for granted any time soon. 

They must have been like this in the past, he'd just never seen it. Before, they'd all go their separate ways after a particularly difficult job. And it wasn't like Booker was against it, or begrudged them their need to be so close. It was just that it was, in one Stephen-Merrick-shaped-case, Booker’s fault that they were in this mindset. Playing defense. And it was also on Booker’s conscience that he was just now wondering how much of their anxiety or distress they must have held back from him before, whether consciously or not. And it all made him feel like a complete ass. Consciously or not.

Because… because they were trying to make this okay, they actually were. Compensating in little ways as Andy pulled back. Nicky was still cautious with him, looking at him startled sometimes like he didn’t really know why Booker was still hanging around. But he cooked some of his favorite foods regularly, ceded Booker’s preferred seats to him in cars and planes, quietly stocked their kitchens with different juices and local drinks to distract him from alcohol.

Joe was still Joe for the most part, smiling, a warm presence at his back, finding just the right time to knock his shoulder into Booker’s to break him free of dark thoughts, but something about him was off. Booker couldn’t figure it out, but it was there. Like a plate of glass was placed between them (he refused to see it as those iron bars separating their cells, Joe handcuffed on one side, him on the other, just waiting for guards to come back and take him away), and the moment a conversation even hinted at going towards Quynh or Madrid, he flinched and faded away from it, retreated to that island. And Nile-

“Okay, let’s go again,” Nile grabbed the deck of cards right out his hand, shuffling with a much more practiced ease every time she did. “What’s this one called again, Booker? Hmm?”

She was purposefully dragging him into a conversation, voice a little louder than normal, lighter than normal. And he appreciated it, he did, appreciated her full heart and stubbornness (boy, that was a common trait between them all, wasn’t it?), but… what was it Andy had said his first night back? Nile was not subtle.

She was still so young and still had so much to learn. And Booker was afraid of fucking it up for her. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint where and when he’d gone wrong himself all those years before- what if he put her down the same path accidentally?

(But what if he didn’t do enough, and she lost her way _because_ he wasn’t there for her?)

And in the same breath, a rather impatient voice in his head pointed out that it was just as likely he wasn’t a factor in any of this. At all. He did a lot of observing in his newly sober state. He watched how Joe and Nicky treated Nile, how Andy led the three of them, this dynamic they had built. And how Nile was with them, the teasing and the camaraderie, the acceptance, the intelligence and enthusiasm she contributed. It had taken Booker so much longer to find his footing when he joined the group. And not much time at all to lose it.

It was an exhausting battle in his mind each day, to let the optimistic part (maybe not half, he wasn’t that delusional, was he?) convince him he hadn’t been a fuckup from day one. And that even with the things they'd all gone through, there was always the chance- a real chance- that he could make things right again, for himself if no one else.

  
***

  
Booker took it upon himself to be in charge of the location-jumping after they left Frankfurt. He was the only one of them with safehouses Quynh wouldn’t know about. He and Copley set up a relay of a couple around the UK, across to Bursa, over to Marrakesh, back up to Finland (hoping to get a smile from Joe, but the one he got was pained, and too small, and Booker backslid into wishing desperately for a bottle of vodka for the next three days straight). 

He was back to wrestling with that feeling now, too, on this little back porch of this little house overlooking the river in Gdańsk. Not because of Joe, not because of Nile’s overeagerness or Nicky’s wariness. No, tonight’s winner was-

“It’s like she wants me to hit her,” Nile grumbled, dropping down on the top step next to him. “Or, or, like, kick her in the shin. Stomp on her big toe.”

“That’s very violent of you,” he managed to get out in the appropriately amused tone, stuff the craving and disquiet back under mental lock and key. “I’m a little proud, to be honest.”

“She deserves it,” Nile glared over her shoulder. “Something as painful and annoying as she’s being right now.” A pause, lowering her voice. “You see it, right? Her mood gets worse every time we move.”

Booker nodded. “It's Quynh."

Nile paused her glaring. "It's... how?"

"She's been hoping Quynh would have come at us again by now, show her face. Every time we settle into a new place, and Quynh isn’t here, it disappoints her. She doesn’t handle disappointment well.” Understatement, quite possibly.

Or very possibly, judging by Nile’s raised eyebrow. “It was her idea. Her plan. To lay low for awhile until we’ve gotten more intel.”

He smiled a little, hand almost reaching for a flask in his jacket before he remembered it wasn’t there. Joe had snuck a plastic kazoo into that pocket two months ago, just to see how long it would take for Booker to discover it. (Three weeks, both an embarrassingly short and impressively long time for a newly-recovering alcoholic. Joe and Nicky had looked so proud of him for it, and the stupidly embarrassing warmth from that had sustained him another two weeks alone.) “Doesn’t mean she isn’t still hoping to see her.”

Nile handed him a water bottle; she always seemed to have one on hand whenever he thought of going for that pocket. “So we either have to wait to get attacked by a pissed off immortal with impulse control issues, or deal with a pissed off mortal's temper tantrums. Great. Wonderful.” Another glare back at the house, but it melted into something sad, worried when she turned back to Booker. “She’s going to do something dumb.”

“Do someth-”

Nile waved a hand, amending. “Say something dumb. She’s pushing that line now, Booker. That shit tonight at Nicky and Joe? It's just going to get worse, and she's going to end up hating herself for it when all this is settled.”

He nodded, but said nothing. It had been bad tonight. They all knew Andy was going off on little searches on her own, maybe even trying to draw Quynh out directly to her, and they were all simultaneously worried, pissed, and resigned to it. Mortal or not, you couldn’t make Andy do anything she didn’t want to. Even if it was just asking her to stay in tonight instead of going out alone again.

_Fuck this, you can’t keep me here. I’m not your fucking prisoner._

It had been a dumb thing to say, and they’d all winced at it, even Andy. And they’d all purposefully not looked at each other. Probably unsure of which of them would react the worst to it if acknowledged. But Nicky had been tense and tired for the rest of the evening, Joe curled up silently in the small space next to him, Nile had paced for a good twenty minutes, and Booker just wished he had a bottle of anything to drown out memories of cells and handcuffs and syringes filled with bright blue-

“Hey,” Nile nudged him with her elbow. “There’s a whole lot of shit we can’t do right now. We can’t find Quynh, we can’t calm Andy down, we can’t make those two in there feel safe again, but we can, y'know, stop you from dehydrating tonight. Drink the water, then come back inside, okay?”

He elbowed her right back, then deliberately twisted the cap off the water bottle, toasted her with it. “I’ll do it for you, and you only.”

She rolled her eyes, but grinned all the same. “I’ll take all the victories I can get.”

“There’s probably a lesson in that,” he held his arm out steady so she could use it to leverage herself back to her feet. “If I were drunk, I’d be able to to figure it all out and tell you.”

“I’d rather you be sober and stupid, then,” she nudged him with her foot this time before turning back to the house. 

“I’ll come in in a minute,” was his answer to that. She nodded, grin going a little soft, and left him to the silence, the peace and the dark and calm in front of him. He drank the water, and it almost felt like doing a good deed for the day. He’d done _something_ good, at least. On the scale of ‘absolute shit’ to ‘survivable,’ maybe today was going to rate a-

“This is a very pretty house.”

Fuck.

He sat frozen on that top step, hoping at least to keep his eyes narrowed instead of going wide, but he honestly had no idea what his face looked like right now, as Quynh leaned against the railing below him.

She was scanning the front porch, the roof, the brick chimney above it. “I like the garden. And the window shutters, the blue is a nice shade. It's much better than that last place. That smell? Downwind from a processing plant, how is that supposed to help you all relax, Booker?”

Hearing that voice, so casual, knowing, and terrifying, say his name helped break him from his trance. “The fuck do you want?” He adjusted his stance just a little, turned to the side a fraction of an inch in case he needed to draw the gun from his waistband. Just because Quynh didn’t look armed didn’t mean shit, he’d learned that lesson the hard way. More than once.

She was still peering over his shoulder. The window curtains were blocking her view inside to the others, thank God. “You all didn’t go out much at the last three houses. I wanted to make sure everyone was okay.”

“You wanted… what?”

“It’s not normal, is it? Andromache has flitted in and out, sure, but for Nicolò and Yusuf to stay cooped up inside for four months, that’s not like them. Not under normal circumstan-”

“Would you consider their sister kidnapping and drugging one of them to be normal circumstances?” he snapped.

“Didn’t their brother arrange for the very same thing last year?” she threw right back.

“Fuck you,” he didn’t allow that one to hit (well, fuck, of course it did, it _burned_ dead center through his chest, but he wasn’t going to let her see that).

“You’re all still recuperating, then,” she carried on like she hadn’t heard him, unconcerned.

Except no, that wasn’t true. She actually did sound concerned for them, and he couldn’t tell if it was a performance, or she was genuine, or genuinely insane. It was unsettling. “We’re fine,” he growled back through gritted teeth.

“I’m not sure I believe you. But I guess it’s at least partially true,” she nodded to the water bottle. “You haven’t had liquor in your hand since the week after Frankfurt, have you? Or does that slip up in Turkey count? It probably does. It wasn’t a lot, you were very good at pouring the rest of it out soon after, but-”

“What. The fuck. Do you want?” he repeated, planting one hand firmly, visibly, on his gun. He wouldn't draw it yet, but he could. He wouldn't alert the others yet- that would only make it worse, they were safer inside right now, but he-

“I’d still take you on, you know,” she not-answered. She planted one foot solidly- but quietly- on the bottom step, leaned in a little closer. “You’re much steadier now than the last time I made a job offer. And maybe the ending wasn’t what I wanted, but inadvertently working for me in Madrid certainly helped-”

Booker was standing before he had clocked his own movement, towering over her. “Don’t.” The look on Joe’s face when she’d pulled that shit- lost, confused, hurt- flashed before his eyes. As it had a lot of nights since they escaped.

Quynh smiled, not at all intimidated by the new height difference. “There he is,” she sing-songed. “There’s the fighter. You’ve been nothing but poor sad Mr. Raincloud these last few months. Even after falling back into the fold of merry men here. Do you want to know why I think that is?”

He really didn't want to know. He started to pull his gun. Fuck this, he wasn’t-

“Because you’re worried that it’s only a matter of time before you cause someone’s downfall again.” She shrugged. “Your own, at the very least.”

His gun stayed where it was. Another dead center, burning hit. “What?”

She had both feet on the bottom step now. “Did you really do anything to fix those issues that led to the unfortunate situation last year? Or the situation with me?” She paused, examined her fingernails. “Seems to me like you’ve just been moping on back porches, letting the others clean up all the messes once again. I'd guess Nicolò, and he does it without complaint, doesn't he? Such a good man. The others would follow whatever he said, I'm sure. It must sting, being face-to-face with all those failures.” Another step up closer to him. “It’s a lot less messy on my side of things.”

“Less messy,” he snorted, held his ground despite the urge to let his knees shake. He refused to admit he was running back through the last few weeks, trying to figure out how many times Nicky had been the one to... to take care of things. Not just with Joe, but the whole group. Did Nicky think Booker couldn't be... No, fuck, Quynh was just trying to-

“You don’t trust them either,” like she wasn’t dropping a grenade at his feet, cutting his legs out from under him. She studied him for a moment, whatever was on his face, rapped her knuckles casually against the wooden railing. “Yes. Yes, that’s part of it too, isn’t it? There’s a plan in your head somewhere, isn’t there? For when you decide to leave, when you think you’ll have to. Not back to Paris, though, that’s too easy. But somewhere way far away, in case they cause your downfall for you." She nodded, approving. "That's smart. Better to make it your choice before they’d force you out again.”

“That’s not… No.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t true. It was his-

“You’ve been lucky so far, Booker,” she was almost level with him now, her voice lowering to a deadly serene. “You were lucky Yusuf got free from my doctor, the two of you broke out when you did. You’re lucky he’s as recovered as he is,” she shook her head mournfully, and he couldn’t tell if it was _real_ or not. “What would you and everyone have done if they’d arrived and there was nothing left of him but an empty husk?”

“I'd have dropped you back in the ocean,” he snarled, tried to stop himself from engaging that much, but he found the calmer Quynh was, the more he wanted to scream. And he couldn’t. He couldn’t let the others hear. He couldn’t let her ask him what he thought the group would’ve done to _him_ if Joe had been-

“And what about next time, hmm?” she didn’t seem all that phased by it. “What’s going to happen if sweet baby angel Nile is caught in a web? What if you cause her to be-”

He swung hard and fast, a clean right hook, that she just as cleanly ducked under, so fast, scarily-fast, _Andy_ -fast, dropping back down off the steps. A smile crossed her face- triumphant, like that was what she’d wanted all along. She kept dropping away, back, back, until she disappeared from sight. Gone. Booker never even made it off the porch.

He ended up sitting back on the top step with a heavy thud, the breath knocked out of him. This was bad. Monumentally bad. Actually, no, he’d seen monumentally bad before. This was assassination-of-archdukes bad.

And he still couldn’t make himself get the others. He wanted to, and he knew he should.

But if he did…

He didn't want to be responsible for putting that look on Joe's face again. For having to tell them that she'd threatened Nile. He didn't want Nicky to spend another night awake, trying to plan for every possible attack. He didn't want to lose Andy.

If Andy knew Quynh was here? Nearby? She'd be out the door in seconds.

_But that's not the only reason, is it?_ it almost sounded like Quynh was back in front of him, that was how insidious that voice in him was. Because there was another worry, too. That he'd just be dragging them back into this shit once again. And knowing them like he did (like Quynh did), wouldn't they want to take care of everything, keep him away from porches from now on, and clean up his mess yet again? Or would they be pissed at him for letting her get away? Would they wonder, just a small part of them, if he’d let her get away on purpose?

Booker was pretty sure if he looked in their eyes- no matter what they said- and saw distrust there, he’d be back in a bottle by sunrise.

No. There was something he could do, though. He took a couple more deep breaths, and pulled from his pocket not his gun- but his phone. 

[I need you to set up a new safehouse. Crete.]

Not even a minute later, 

_[Bored of Poland already?]_

[Full security systems, the works. You have 36 hours.]

_[It’ll be ready in 24.]_

Quynh had to be tracking them somehow, and until he could be sure it wasn’t his messages to Copley, decoy houses would have to be step number one. He'd buy some plane tickets, arrange a car pickup in Chania, maybe even get some food delivered to the place. Even if it sent her there for a day or two, that was one more day or two that he had to plan.

Because step number two? All he had at the moment was: try not to let anything else get messy. Try not to put the others in danger. Prove Quynh wrong. Because she was, she was just fucking with him, saying anything to make him doubt his own mind. She'd done it before, hadn't she? That was all this was, and he wouldn't take the bait. He could be stronger than that. Hell, the team was stronger than that.

And he kept telling himself that until his hands stopped shaking and he could go back inside.


	2. I Am Erupting, Don’t Interrupt It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Quynh continues to be Spike in the Yoko Factor episode of Buffy season 4. And what our loveable family lacks in communication skills, they make up for in amazingly bad luck. It’s almost like a writer is creating situations for the highest possible dramatic value.

  
The fist came at her fast, a fierce right hook, and she ducked under it quickly, repositioning her feet to keep her balance. But then another fist was coming her way, left this time, and she threw up her own right arm to block it, twisted around the elbow and shoved away, ending up on the other side of the attack. 

Andy nodded. “Good.” Then, amending with a tilt of her head, “Better.”

“Oh thanks,” Nile grumbled, already throwing in a combo of her own, hoping to at least push Andy back closer to the tree line where the ground was less steady. Andy blocked both punches and, to Nile’s great relief, went for a strike at her legs to throw her off balance. It was a more defensive move than Andy would normally do, giving her more time. “Good,” she smirked.

Andy rolled her eyes and- probably out of spite because Nile was convinced _that_ was what had kept her alive for thousands of years, not immortality- moved in quick again, attacking, not quite full-speed but close enough. Nile held her own for as long as she could, more than a little proud of the hits she did get in- more than last time. Okay, like, two more. But still. Two more. Against _Andy_.

Of course, like so many of the victories lately, it was short-lived as she accidentally dropped her elbow just a little too low and Andy got a good shot in at her face, nearly breaking her nose. “Ah, shit,” the pain was quick and then gone, but enough to bring tears to her eyes, blurring her vision. “Okay, hold up.”

Andy pulled back, stepping away as Nile wiped at her eyes. “One more round?”

“Aren’t you tired yet?” Nile huffed. “Jesus. Who are you competing with to get the most steps in? Because I know it’s not me.” There was a large tree trunk that had fallen over near the clearing, and she plopped herself down with grunt, pulling off one sneaker to shake it out, convinced there was a rock in there somewhere. 

Andy stood nearby, not quite close enough to feel companionable, not far enough to be out-and-out avoiding her. It was impressively done, really. She had her hands on her hips, breathing deeply but not heavily, not yet. The sparring definitely wore her out more as a mortal, but she still had a few thousand years of cardio training under her belt. So not fair.

Nile let her stare at her for another twelve seconds, then rolled her eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Andy shrugged. “I was just waiting to see if that was a veiled question about something else going on, or if we could get back to training.”

“If I wanted to talk about other stuff going on, I would talk about other stuff going on,” Nile pointed out, re-lacing her shoe. “Besides, you’re not the one who gets to be tired in that scenario.”

“Oh, and you are?” 

Oh shit, they were doing this. “A little bit, yeah. It’s been pretty exhausting watching you be an asshole to everybody when they just need you to be their sister for a little while. We all need you.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” she grunted, spreading her arms wide for a moment before dropping them again. But she wasn’t looking Nile in the eye now. 

“Nope,” she said simply. “You’re somewhere else. All the time.” She refused to stand up now, waited and waited, until Andy finally sighed and sat farther down on the log. “Whatever deal you’re not dealing with, Quynh or whatever, it’s pulled you away from us.”

“‘Quynh or whatever,’” Andy muttered, giving a dark little laugh. “Yeah. That.”

Nile waited a few breaths, trying to gauge the air, figure out if this needed a tough love speech or a motivational speech or a punch to the face or-

“You know I can feel the difference? All the time. Every morning. I’ve started _counting mornings_ again. My back and knees ache, my knuckles. I sprained my shoulder during that job in Minsk six months ago and it still fucking twinges sometimes. It’s like this isn’t my body anymore. I wake up some mornings and it doesn’t feel like I belong in it,” Andy trailed off, unconsciously rolling the sore shoulder.

Nile stayed quiet for a little bit longer. Okay. This was not the direction she thought this was going to go in, but here they were. “I don’t think we need you because of your shoulder, Andy.” 

She scoffed. “That’s not what I-” 

“You spent a year training me to be one of your soldiers. Yours. When you first met me, you told me you led an army. _You._ Andy, this here,” she waved a hand between them, then back in the direction of the house where they’d left Booker quiet but not asleep in his room, Nicky on the couch looking at a book without actually reading, Joe baking something because drawing hadn’t been enough to keep his hands busy. “This is yours. We’re yours. Own up to that.”

Andy was quiet. “That’s going to have to change at some point.”

“Yeah,” she took a deep breath. “At some point, yeah. But not overnight. And not right now, with this other shit going on. We still need you.”

She smiled, and it was almost gentle. “You’re going to realize any day now that that’s not really true.”

Nile debated taking her shoe off again, just to throw it at her. “When I busted into the lab last year, and Joe was upset and yelling at Booker? It wasn’t me or the alarms that got him to calm down and focus. It wasn’t even Nicky. He only listened to you. You were mortal then, too. Didn’t matter.”

“It’s not about me being mortal, kid.”

“Then what is it about?” It felt like they were still sparring, Andy had her on the ropes, and she couldn’t see where the next hit was going to land. She was leaning too far back, and the rope behind her might snap at any minute.

Or like, y’know, everything might snap. (Her money had been on Booker at first, but lately? She was thinking Nicky. She could hear his jaw clench from across the room. She’d seem him angry before, but not this ‘I’m not _just_ angry, I’m _also_ disappointed’ thing he had going on now. He would’ve made a very good Italian grandmother in another life.)

It was still quiet. “What is it about?” she asked again.

But Andy just shook her head, stood up, looked out past the clearing to the trees beyond it. “You good to get back on your own? I’m going to go for a walk.”

Nile didn’t answer at first, on purpose. Drew the silence out until Andy was forced to look back at her. “I know you’re going through shit. And you’ve lost a lot, more than any of us, more than _anyone_ , and it’s gotta be hard to deal with in ways I can’t understand. But it’s-” she raised her voice when she felt, even more than she saw, Andy start to pull away. “It’s making you lose sight of what you do have, right now- _who_ you have- and you’re hurting them by-”

“You good to get back on your own or what?”

She glared now, doing her best imitation of Nicky’s jaw clenching skills. “Yeah, I’m good. I’m great. Fucking fantastic. I guess I should tell them you won’t be back for lunch?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.” It was vague, and it wasn’t Andy. Andy wasn’t vague; she was direct and she was honest and this was-

Nile was worried they were losing her. If Booker was right and it was Quynh that would be the tipping point… part of Nile felt guilty for hoping the confrontation came sooner rather than later. 

Otherwise, she was pretty sure there wouldn’t be much of her left.

  
***

  
She had probably been waiting for him to get back since he headed out, he realized later. She had been ready and waiting for him, so she must have known he was the one who stepped out to make a grocery run on his own. In fact, she’d probably been watching the house for some time, waiting for someone (him specifically?) to be on their own.

Nicky deduced all that later, of course. Right now he was standing, a little dumbfounded, arms full of groceries, leaning back against the trunk of the car, staring at Quynh.

“You look so surprised, darling,” she cocked her head to the side, studying him. “You didn’t already know I was here?”

“I’ve been preoccupied with other things,” he managed to keep his voice even. “Forgive me for not having perfect spatial awareness.” He set the bags on top of the trunk without looking away from her, then squared his shoulders again. Kept his muscles loose, his hands at his sides, ready for- for…? 

Quynh seemed amused and sad in one breath. Nicky found he was holding his, unable to get a full inhale. With how quickly things had moved in Madrid, how worried and furious and distracted he’d been, this was really the first time he was looking at his sister, speaking to her, in… five hundred years. Despite the past few months, how he’d mentally pushed himself away from her, part of him felt so pulled too, wanted to hug her, hold her close, comb the ever-present tangles out of her hair like he used to-

Except there were no tangles. Her hair was cut short and sleek, well kept. She looked completely different and exactly the same, somehow. (It was the contemporary clothes, they were startling. In all the possible scenarios in which they could be reunited with Quynh, he’d never thought to picture her in high heels and wool pea coats, apparently.) 

She _felt_ completely different and exactly the same, too. Sharp, fierce, calculating. But it was darkened now. She wasn’t… this wasn’t who she was supposed to be.

“You look well, considering,” she tried again. Trying for what, he didn’t know, but it felt like she was digging for something. She’d always been good at that. Andy was never not direct, but Quynh could always find the right question or comment to let loose every thought in your head. 

“Considering what?” he asked carefully. He was untethered. He couldn’t find the rhythm of how he used to speak to Quynh, or maybe it was that he couldn’t remember it. Focusing on that feeling kept him from doing any digging himself, going into that well of rage he’d thought was finally gone. But it wasn’t, he could feel little bits of it now in growing his stomach, rising to his chest. 

“Considering everything,” she was standing upright, arms crossed, but somehow made it seem like she was leaning back with ease. And Nicky understood why she was doing it, she was taking control of the conversation. He was just along for the ride.

“If ‘everything’ includes what you did to Yusuf, then you’re wrong. I’m not well at all, Quynh.”

Her eyes flashed with some emotion, raw but not wild. Whether it was him saying Joe’s name or hers (how many times has she heard her own name in the last five centuries, he wondered. Just her dreams?), he didn’t know. “He’s still hurting.”

It wasn’t a question, but he wouldn’t have bothered lying anyway. “Yes.”

Quynh frowned, upset at that. And looked so much like she used to, when she would get so concerned over the two of them, banish Andy to go refill their water skins while she initiated what amounted to fireside therapy sessions. To this day, he and Joe always talked things out best over a fire, because of her. Asking those innocuous questions, guiding them to exactly what they needed to get out or understand or-

Oh. He still loved her. It was a forceful, sudden realization that almost caused Nicky to lose his breath again. He still loved Quynh, he just did know if this _was_ Quynh anymore. He flashed back to those late night conversations back in Germany after the rescue mission and his own worries then- how much of who Quynh was now was really her fault? Could she still be saved?

He didn’t know. He might never be able to definitively say. She’d been traumatized, her life stolen, the pure torture of what she’d gone through- but she’d turned that onto Joe and Booker, and that was… that was less conflicting for him. She’d done that, she’d _hurt_ them. She was _still_ hurting them. And she was hurting Andy just by-

“Why are you doing this to yourself, Nicolò?” Quynh shook her head, and the way she did- it wasn’t acting. She wasn’t playing this up, she was genuinely- “I honestly expected you to have taken Yusuf and Nile somewhere far away by now.”

Digging again. Casting a line at him. He had no idea where this was going and she obviously did. “What?”

“Because of how you feel about them.” As though that was a perfectly reasonable response, as though she could see right through him to the darkest part of his brain. (She could, was the problem, she’d always been particularly adept at that.) “Booker can’t be trusted to have your back, Andromache can’t be trusted to lead… where does that leave the rest of you?”

He clenched his jaw hard enough to feel his back molars grind together. Got himself together. Somewhat. “What are you doing, Quynh? What is this?”

“I wanted to see how you were.”

“Sure. Of course. And Madrid? Those drugs and what you did to- what was that?”

She pursed her lips, thinking hard. “I had to see if the drug worked, darling. I’d paid that man too much money not to see it all the way through.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Why didn’t you just- why didn’t you come to us? Why did you hurt him?” 

“Because I could,” she answered, and Nicky couldn’t swallow that, couldn’t accept it. Would have argued, but Quynh pushed on. “And I still could. Which is why I can’t figure out why you haven’t taken him away from the danger.”

“Danger,” Nicky let out a short not-laugh. “Is that how you refer to yourself?”

“If that’s the easiest for you, then sure. But we both know it’s not just me.” She cocked her head to the side, and it felt like her eyes were all over him, even though she didn’t move. “Ah. You _have_ thought about it, haven’t you? However briefly. Grabbing Yusuf and the new kid and finding a safe haven somewhere without all this stress and uncertainty. You’ve thought about what it would mean to have to lead the group yourself, instead of Andromache.”

“I haven’t-”

“You’ve been assessing. It’s still one of your strengths, yes? You’re a sniper now, of course it is. Formulating plans. You were always so good at that. What I wonder, Nicky-” and there it was, now her voice got slick and ruthless, raising the hairs on the back of Nicky’s neck. He’d never heard her use his contemporary name before. “-is did you make one of those plans for just Joe and Nile? To protect them from you, too?”

He stumbled back the two inches to the trunk of the car, his elbow thunking painfully against the metal. And he hated himself for giving that away so easily. “Stop it, Quynh, don’t do this. Don’t be this person. Just- come inside with me, please? We can all talk-”

“Oh, Nicky, no, we can’t. You know that. There would be no talking if I walked in there. How would everyone even react?” She laughed a little, and it startled him. He missed her _laugh_. Her real one, laughing at Andy’s ridiculous quests for food or Nicky’s blush at Joe’s purposefully lavish poems. He would have taken a step back from this version of a laugh now, if he could. She did it for him, retreating a few feet towards the road, into the dark fog surrounding them. “You could always come with me, you know. We could talk some more. Make more plans. If you’re really worried about not being able to count on Andy or Booker right now.”

He managed to pull a glare back onto his face, stand up straighter. “I won’t leave any of them for you. _You_ know _that_.”

Another step back. “Do I? I’d be much more worried about staying with them, the way things are now. Two of them you can’t get yourself to trust… three, if you count yourself. One more thing goes wrong for you, how long would it take, do you think, before you turned into someone like me? Wouldn’t it be easy to smooth some of that out now?”

“No.”

“Come on, darling,” another laugh, another step away. “You don’t think you have it in you? To be ruthless, calculating… _angry_.”

“No,” he said again, much quieter. Suddenly nauseous, steeling his voice as much as he could.

Quynh just nodded, seeing past it, into his head. Like she always did. And she’d always been right before, hadn’t she? “Oh, Nicky, you need to be careful. You don’t want to revert back to old ways, do you?”

The words echoed in his head, and Nicky actually flinched, looking away from her. Which was stupid, one of the first things he’d ever learned as a sniper- before that, when she’d taught him archery- never take your eyes off the target. But by the time he had the strength to draw up his head to glare at her, draw up his lungs to snap something back… she was gone. He was standing there alone in the dark, in the fog, nothing but two bags of groceries to witness the fallout. 

_She called me sweetheart and then tore me to shreds with a smile on her face._ That was what Joe had said that night after being rescued, hadn’t he? Nicky drew another deep breath, wiped a hand down his face, half-surprised there were no tears there. More than half-surprised he had the strength left to even do that. 

The damn groceries were the only thing that got him moving- he had ice cream for Nile in there that he didn’t want to melt. Nicky took each wild thought and fear and question buzzing around his brain and tucked them away. _Not now._ He pushed them down and then pushed himself off the car, towards the house. There were more important things to deal with right now. Dinner. That was important.

Nile was the only one to greet him when he entered. “Hey! Booker said for us to go ahead and have dinner without him, he’ll eat later. Something about planning another safehouse.”

He nodded, waited one extra second before being sure his voice would be steady. “Andy?”

And already knew the answer before Nile could say it. “She ducked out like twenty minutes after you left. I don’t think she’ll be back tonight,” Nile’s own voice was steady, but annoyed. Fed up. She visibly shook it off before looking back up at Nicky. “Do you need help? I could, um…” She waved a hand at her current situation.

And Nicky allowed himself to smile a little bit, allowed himself to appreciate the sight in front of him. Nile was comfortably burrowed in Nicky’s hoodie, another cartoon movie playing on the television with singing and brassy jazz music. And Joe- beautiful, sleeping, _safe_ \- was curled up with his toes just barely touching her hip, Nile with one hand steady on his ankle. He shook his head. “Stay put. I’ll let you know when it’s ready, and then you can help by waking him up for me.”

She groaned, but at least she was smiling again. “I always get the hard jobs. This is hazing, isn’t it?”

“It’s how we all earned our stripes, Nile,” he called over his shoulder as he headed into the kitchen. And the moment he was alone he gripped the counters tightly to keep his hands from shaking. _Not now, not now,_ he forced everything back down. Not until he could process it, think some more, talk it over with Joe privately. 

He needed distance and more information first. And more perspective. Nile and Booker, they only knew Quynh as this, as she was now. And yes, he was still furious with her for what she’d done. And yes, he was scared of whatever she had planned now. But there was so much more to this, to her. To _them_. Even if they tried, he wasn’t sure Nile or Booker could understand the weight of what they’d had together, before. 

And Andy? There was a chance- he was too afraid to calculate the actual odds- that if she knew Quynh was here she’d head out on her own… and no matter how it ended, they’d never see her again. And until he had a better idea of what Quynh was doing here, he couldn’t- he couldn’t risk Andy disappearing on them _(dying)_ for good.

He pulled his phone out.

[Update on Quynh’s location?]

_[Nothing since she was spotted in Finland. Three days after you left.]_

[Do another search please.]

_[Ok. Will let you know if I find something.]_

There. That was something, at least. If Quynh had managed to track them to Poland, Copley would be able to track her and give Nicky intel. He’d have more of an idea of what she was doing, and then he could talk with Joe about what to do. That was a good plan. Smart. Logical.

And Nicky tried to let it calm him down, and not let one more brand new fear surface inside him- this plan, keeping it quiet (for now)- tactical over emotional. Was that who he was? 

_You don’t think you have it in you? To be ruthless, calculating… angry_. 

No. Quynh was wrong. He wasn’t that person. And he wasn’t her.

He wasn’t going to let her beat them.

  
***

  
“I don’t understand why you’re being so hard on yourself.”

Booker took a deep, calming, almost meditative breath before answering. “Because I don’t know how this happened.” 

Joe’s voice behind him was kind. Too kind. “There’s no harm in trying again.”

Another breath. It did absolutely nothing to help. “Joe?”

“Yes, Book?”

“I don’t want to harm _you_ , but if you say one more word, I will break this contraption from hell on your face.”

Joe just laughed, and Booker was forced to turn to glare at him. He paid no attention to it, sitting cross-legged on top of the kitchen table, pitting the bowl of plums next to his knee for Nicky to use later, tossing the pits out the open window over his shoulder. “It has _French_ in the _name_.” Delighted, like that was the greatest thing he’d ever heard.

“Stop it.”

“It’s not even some advanced wonder, it’s just mechanics. How can you not-”

“Joe-”

“You just press it. That’s also in the name. How do you break it every time?”

“It’s cursed.” He tossed the metal demon and its broken springs into the sink and grabbed a pot for the stove instead. “Or I am.” There was no reply for a good minute while he made his coffee the old fashioned way, and when he turned back to glance at Joe again, his expression was quieter, thoughtful. “That was a joke, Joe.”

“Was it?” his voice was quieter too. 

“It was supposed to be. Seemed to go down about as well as everything else is, though.”

Joe offered a smile, but now it was closer to the way all his expressions looked lately. Cautious, lost. “You could… if something’s going on, you could talk to me, you know.”

Past-Booker would’ve thrown out another joke, something sarcastic and deflecting, mocking his sentimentality, and gotten out of the situation. But now, after that practice had festered into a lot of bad choices, and after a heart-to-heart or two while stuck in poorly lit dungeons and dark, endless tunnels… Everybody was trying to be better, he reminded himself.

So instead he sighed, took a seat at the table and looked up at him. He opened his mouth, but flashes of that look on Joe’s face during those heart-to-hearts stole the right words from him. “Nothing’s going on.” Trying to be better, not necessarily succeeding, apparently.

Joe set aside the plums, let his legs hang off the end the table, placed his hands very carefully on his thighs. “Book.”

“I-” But he couldn’t even say Quynh’s name, not to Joe, not when Joe still wouldn’t talk about what she did to them. “It’s been tough reacclimating, that’s all. It’ll be fine.”

Joe frowned down at his hands. “That’s all.”

“It’s been tough,” he tried again. “But it’s not anything you- don’t worry, okay, I don’t want you to have to-”

“You’re lying.”

He stopped. “No, Joe, I-”

“Nicky’s too worried to sleep some nights, and who knows if we’re doing enough to take care of Nile… Andy won’t sit next to me or talk to me for longer than five minutes, and you- you’re lying.” He was still staring at his hands. “Do you two not… have you all talked about what happened?”

 _Do you not trust me?_ is the question Booker could hear and desperately hoped wouldn’t be asked out loud. “Andy’s not really talking to any of us right now,” he answered instead. He could see the doubt in the tense curve of Joe’s shoulders, the wondering if maybe he wasn’t strong enough, that the others knew it too, that he’d been taken by Quynh for exactly the reasons she’d said- he was the easiest target.

And Booker could fix some of that right now, couldn’t he? He’d just have to tell Joe that Quynh was here, had shown up at the house three night ago and taunted him, made _him_ feel stupid and weak.

But just like before, the moment he tried his throat just closed up. Because all he could see was Joe, cuffed, trapped, while Quynh crouched in front of him and dug her claws in. He didn’t want to send Joe back to that now, even if it was just memories. Hell, they’d all learned how memories were their own type of weapon, hadn’t they? And could cut deep.

This was a new feeling, admittedly. For decades, a century or two, Booker had been good at watching their backs during a mission, taking bullets for them, diving off cliffs and out of planes for them, breaking them out of prisons and morgues and- one lovely time- a sealed bank vault. But this? Booker wasn’t just re-learning how to be around the others, he was re-learning how to be himself. And learning that he wanted to protect them from more than artillery.

Sometimes it felt like meeting them all for the first time. Not just Nile, but Andy, Nicky, Joe too. Seeing who they were without the dark lens of his formerly bitter view clouding his eyes. 

“What is it, then? What aren’t you telling me?” Joe glanced at the kitchen doorway, then the open window, as though they were surrounded. “If you need help with… something, you just have to ask us.”

Ah. He thought Booker might be drinking again and hiding it from them. He wondered if he should be offended or comforted by that, but he was just too tired to nail that particular reaction down. And he could see Joe wanted to ask him straight out, but wasn’t going to. Maybe because he wanted Booker to trust him, maybe because he was tired too.

Booker did want to trust him, all of them. He didn’t… _not_ trust them. Once again, it all came back to his own head. Could he trust Joe enough to tell him the truth? Yes. Could he trust what his, Nicky’s, any of their reactions would be? 

No.

Not yet.

And Joe was sitting there in front of him, and he wasn’t quite looking Booker in the eye, and his hand had started to unconsciously rub at his forearm again. The thought of that drug and how they’d suffered from it, of Joe battling through the memories of a dozen deaths at a time, waking up hurt and hunted, trapped.

“It’s nothing, Joe. I’d tell you if it was,” he offered, the words sounding inadequate even to his own ears.

His brow furrowed, mouth starting to open, Joe looked like he was about to push again (and really, there was a part of Booker hoping he would, hoping Joe would force him to get this off his chest and let the weight be on somebody else for just _five minutes_ ), but then absolutely nothing happened. Joe didn’t speak, he didn’t sigh, didn’t shake his head or nudge at Booker with his elbow or foot or anything. He just let himself drop off the table, heading for the door.

 _I’m trying to do the right thing!_ he wanted to yell. But until he was sure that was true, all that came out was, “Thought you wanted coffee?”

Joe paused in the doorway, shoulders hunching in a little more. “No, I’m not… no. I just came in to talk to you.” And after laying that at his feet, part confession and part accusation, Joe left.

It was pretty effective, Booker had to admit. He moved on autopilot back to the stove, taking the pot off the burner and doing his best to pour coffee into a mug without making a mess. Story of his fucking life, right? 

Instead of going back into the living room, where Joe might be, where Nicky or Nile might be, where Andy was so obviously not, he stayed put. Leaned against the counter, stared out the open window, and tried to convince himself that protecting Joe from an awful truth and making himself a halfway-decent cup of coffee were victories.

Even if they felt like consolation prizes.

  
***

  
“I just came in to talk to you.” And then nothing. _Ouch._

Nile hadn’t mean to eavesdrop on the conversation. She hadn’t known the window was even open until Booker started cursing at the french press, the third they’d bought in as many months. 

She was up on the roof, on the little extra flat bit of landing next to the chimney that happened to stretch right over the kitchen and that open window. It was her spot, she’d settled into it on their second day here and started using it for her mid-morning meditation break. Of course by the fourth day she noticed that it was being swept for dead leaves and bugs, so someone else had been using this spot to. Joe or Nicky or both, she guessed. (God, they better not have had sex in her meditation spot.)

Nile was up on the roof, and she sat herself cross-legged in her spot, hands on her knees, eyes closed, breaths even. She counted the seconds in, the seconds out, and tried her best to put the conversation she’d just overheard out of her head. Because otherwise, she’d be pretty freaked.

 _Pretty freaked about what?_ She heard it in her brother’s voice. Kev had always been slow on the uptake that something was bothering her, but once he figured it out? Dog with a bone.

“To put it in the easiest terms, so someone with your brain capacity could understand?” He would’ve punched her shoulder, but also grinned and stayed put, genuinely curious. “Everybody’s sad.”

_And?_

“And I don’t know if I feel helpless because there’s nothing that can really speed this along and it just needs time, or if I feel helpless because there _is_ a way to fix it and I just can’t figure it out.”

_Maybe it ain’t your job either way._

“It isn’t about ‘job.’ I wouldn’t be doing all the fixing anyway, they’d have to do most of it themselves. It’s about ‘happy.’ ‘Healthy.’ I just…”

_Just what?_

“When all of them start to isolate from each other and wallow in stuff, it makes me feel like I’m even less of a part of all this. They’re all mourning things I wasn’t there for.”

_That’s not something you can do anything about, so it’s dumb to be spending time upset about it._

“You’re dumb.”

_Your mom’s dumb._

“So’s your face.”

 _Well, I’m so glad I raised this amazing, fierce young lady who can come up with such rejoinders as ‘So’s your face.’_ It was her mom now. She’d have waited until Kevin had softened her up, then sent him away and sat next to her, held her hand, waited for her to talk.

“I love them,” she admitted. It didn’t hurt saying to her mom; she’d honestly thought it would. “Not as a replacement for you and Kev, but as them. And they love me, they really do.”

_I know, baby. I know they do. Anyone could see that. You know I wouldn’t stand for anything less._

“So then what do I do? Let them hurt? Try to find Quynh on my-”

_So help me God, child, if you say the words ‘on my own’ right now, I will-_

She stopped her imaginary mom voice with an imaginary wave of her hand. “I wouldn’t for real, but, see, that’s the whole crux of it, right? It’s her. And everybody trying to handle shi- stuff on their own. And that’s dangerous. Right? Because, let’s say Booker goes off and finds her on his own. He’s going to sacrifice himself for the rest of us because he really wants to be punished for everything.”

_When he’s doing a pretty good job of punishing himself already, hmm?_

“Got it in one, Mama. And it wouldn’t be any better if Joe or Nicky dealt with her either, would it? They’re still pretty fu- messed up from last time. Quynh could, like, permanently damage them. And she’d only have to hurt one to hurt the other. And hey, while we’re at it, let’s think about what Andy would do if she had to handle Quynh on her own.”

_It’d be bad?_

“Bad? Mama, I’m way more scared that it’d be nothing. She’ll let Quynh kill her or get away with anything. Or even just let her get away. She’s- sorry, there’s no other word, let this one go- she’s fucked up right now.”

 _Hey, it’s not like she can get any of the rest of you killed_ , she heard her brother chime back in. He probably never left, just stood in the corner, shoving whatever snack was closest into his mouth.

“She can get everybody hurt, though. And I think sometimes the hurt lasts longer when your life lasts longer,” she mused. “So. Yeah. Back to the question of the day. What do I do? Can I do anything? Am I just the… I don’t know, the intern?”

And for the briefest moment, she could almost feel her mom’s hand cup the side of her face, and she almost cried. _Love them, and let them love you. Just because you’re new doesn’t mean you’re expendable, honey. You’re going to figure out your special skills and what you bring to the table as you go. In the meantime, there’s no shame in being a team player. There’s nothing ‘just’ about that. It’s not a job, remember? It’s your family. No one’s better at family then you, kiddo. Trust me._

Nile opened her eyes slowly, in time with her deep breaths. And was kinda surprised to find them dry. “Good imaginary pep talk, Mama.” For a solid few minutes, everything was peaceful and settled, and she almost felt- dare she say it- optimistic? 

And when her phone vibrated in her pocket, for the tiniest second she was surprised, wondered how Kevin or her mom knew she was thinking about them and decided to call her. And then it hurt, deeply and sharply, but briefly, when reality came seeping back in and she remembered they couldn’t.

But none of those feelings compared to the shock at the name that did pop up on her lock screen. She answered with a suspicious swipe of her finger and a wary tone. “Copley?" Why was he calling her, of all immortal people? "Is, uh, everything okay?”


	3. Careful I’m An Animal (Trap Trap Trap)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which that strategy they’ve had of keeping quiet and letting things work out in their own time? Yeah, no. No.

  
Considering everything, Andy found it heavily ironic that she was finding solace by a river. The sound of the water, and knowing it led straight to the sea- it should have been gut-wrenching at this point. Aggravating, at the very least. But maybe right now, and this morning specifically, she felt safer here then on drier ground.

Because Quynh was here. 

She was in Gdańsk. She was here and knew where they were and had been standing in the back garden eighteen hours ago. Who knew what she’d done in the time since, but she-

She was _here_.

She’d been standing there with her hands on her hips when Andy had come back from a run, like she’d been waiting for her, like this was centuries ago when she’d get annoyed with Andy for ducking out at sunrise without her.

She was here, and she’d been surveying the house, the completely peaceful exterior (and probably somehow sensed the supremely tense interior). Making no move to get closer or get inside, but definitely calculating something. Andy had wondered in the back of her mind if Quynh’s battle plans were still sixteenth century based, or if she had any idea-

Then Quynh had turned, like she knew Andy was there. Maybe she did. Andy could only speak for herself and say that… that _pull_ was still there. Quynh was her other half, was half of her- there had been times Andy wasn't sure if Quynh was more than half of her- and losing her the first time had ruined Andy. If (when?) she lost Quynh again, that would be all of her. There'd be nothing left.

They had stared at each other. Not in shock, not in horror, just stared. Andy found herself cataloguing each and every difference, each thing that time and Quynh had changed without her knowing or seeing or arguing over with her. Everything about her now that wasn’t Andy’s. 

Her hair, her clothes, the gun she could tell was stored in a red leather ankle boot. The look in her eyes, not full of mischief or determination, but calculating and distant. So, so distant. So wrong. 

Andy could have done any number of things: talked to her, yelled at her, shot her, fuck- even just turned and run away. But she did nothing. She hadn’t been so… stuck, like that, in maybe a thousand years or so. Not frozen, she didn’t freeze, she had just… she... Quynh was _right there_.

And then Quynh had moved, had moved towards her, had taken six, seven, eight steps. More. Ten, eleven, twelve. In her direction. And Andy had just _watched_. Just _watched_ as Quynh walked up to her, got up even with her, then kept walking past. Andy hadn’t been able to turn, stood there and listened as nearly-silent footsteps got farther and farther away behind her. 

Quynh was here. And Andy was barely holding her shit together.

So here she was now, sitting across the road from the house, keeping it within her line of sight (what if Quynh came back? What if she was planning another attack on the others? What if she took them from Andy again?), staring out at nothing from the riverbank.

But also at not-nothing, because she couldn’t stop thinking about those tunnels in Madrid. Turning the corner behind Nicky just as he and Booker had drawn on each other. Seeing Joe barely hanging onto consciousness, barely hanging onto Booker's shoulder. Seeing Booker’s face, frantic and overwhelmed, and then so fucking relieved to see them. Joe shaking as he hugged her and Nile, Booker sounding like he was taking the blame as he told Andy it was Quynh who’d hurt them.

It had hurt all of them. Quynh had hurt all of them. The first person in Andy’s entire goddamn life to teach her about family and acceptance, love- and she’d attacked the very family she’d helped create. How the fuck did Andy reconcile all that?

And how the fuck was she supposed to fix all this before she died?

There were footsteps behind her again, and she simultaneously dismissed that they were Quynh’s and recognized that they were Joe’s. She didn’t have to worry about schooling her face into something neutral, but she did prepare herself for whatever words were coming. A joke or something too sweetly concerned for her to handle right now or-

But there was nothing. Joe folded himself down next to her, leaving plenty of room between them. No contact at all. She almost let herself mourn that, before remembering she was the one who’d been shying away from it. She hadn’t been able to look at Joe without seeing the worst of Quynh in everything he did now, the hesitant way he’d been carrying himself lately.

He pulled his knees up to chest but kept his hands at his sides, fingers digging into the dirt. She watched him, and said nothing. What could she say, at this point, that would make any-

“I was tortured twice in as many years, because of the choices made by people I consider family,” his voice was soft, maybe a little higher-pitched than normal. It did nothing to stop the sharp laceration of pain across her chest, even as he continued. “Neither time was your fault.”

“I encouraged Booker. I abandoned Quynh.”

He still wasn’t looking at her, but she was looking right at him, saw him close his eyes tightly, tight enough that it seemed like it should leave his face sore. “So did I, then.”

“You didn’t-”

“She wanted to hurt you, when she had us. She wanted you to know she was doing it to hurt you.”

“And so,” Andy waved a hand grandly, furiously. “Because of me.”

“No,” the word should have come out firm, defiant, strong- all the things Joe was supposed to be. But it sounded tired, and sad. “No, she wanted you to think it was your fault.” A small, tentative smile. “When have you ever done anything just because someone else wanted you to?”

“You and Nicky wanted me to stop looking for her.”

She heard the words like someone else had spoken them. She hadn’t meant to, that was for damn sure. And she hadn’t meant for him to get that look on his face and curl in on himself a little more. “We wanted you to stop killing yourself.” Then, to really drive it home, hurt her right back, “We wanted to keep the only family we had left.”

She balled both hands into fists, then mirrored Joe’s action by pushing them into the ground, letting the dirt (not blood, not ocean water) seep through the space between her fingers. “You haven’t been yourself since what she did.” Which was true, even if she’d said it a little out of spite.

“Neither have you.”

Also true, and also a direct hit. Andy never took a hit without throwing back a counter. Because if she couldn’t figure out what the hell her own problem was, she definitely didn’t want somebody else figuring it out first. “You’re freaking the others out. They’re concerned. Distracted.”

“I know.”

“You’re scared it’s going to happen again, that she’ll hurt you again and you won't be able to get away again.” She just wanted to shut up but she couldn’t stop. She wanted him to _make_ her shut up. “You’re scared that whatever she said to you is true, and you’re just the last one to realize it. Did I miss anything?”

“That I’m embarrassed,” he said quietly, voice carrying out across the water.

“You’re what?” Out of all the things she thought he’d possibly say...

“I’m embarrassed,” he said again, scrunching up one side of his face, the way he did when he was learning a new language and trying to find the right word, before nodding to himself. “To have been wounded. Not because I was wounded, but the way of it. Like that.”

“Joe. That-”

“And to still be wounded. I don’t like…” he paused again, and she hated- she hated so much- that he was having trouble with words. “I don’t like being singled out from the rest of you. I don’t like that you all have to take considerations with me.” Even quieter, “It doesn’t feel good, boss.”

It wasn’t like she could tell him that being called ‘boss’ right now just left her sick to her stomach, was it? “We’ve all gone through shit that knocked us down,” Andy tried. 

“No, it’s not okay,” he insisted very gently. “I know I’ll _get_ better, but I need to be _now_. We don’t have time. Not when… no, I need to be better before she comes for us again.”

It was thousands of years of being a hard-ass that kept her from reacting to that. _She already has_. ‘Don’t put that on yourself, Joe. And it’s not like you’re broken now. Just because some things heal quickly with us, it doesn’t mean the slower things are shameful.’

...Is what she should have said. But that sick feeling was still there, and she was worried if she opened her mouth to say anything, she’d just throw up.

Joe was still looking out at the river. “I’d imagined it so many times. Mostly I thought we would be the ones to find her and free her and take care of her-” he wrenched himself away from that train of thought, looking winded at the whiplash of it. “I didn’t want it to be this way, but I- I did sometimes think maybe she would get herself free.” He wrapped his arms around his legs, leaned into them. Making himself smaller again. “We’d know from Nile. Her dream would be… sunshine. Green grass, maybe. Something pretty,” he offered with a little smile.

She swallowed back the nausea. “You can’t-”

“And we’d trace the dreams, and find her. Or she’d trace the dreams and find us, maybe. But we’d…” he shrugged, his shoulders moving half an inch up and then dropping down, like he didn’t want to call attention to the movement. “We’d all be together. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? All of us in one place. I would’ve liked to- I haven’t hugged her in so long. But now my hands shake when I even think of her, so-” He let out a laugh that sounded painful, scraping out the insides of his throat. “I would’ve liked to see her make you smile again.”

“No. We- I can’t-” she did react this time, on her feet before Joe could say anything else. She half-expected him to reach for her, stop her with his hands or his words, but he just kept staring out at the water, eyes casting even farther away from her. _Embarrassed._ “I’m going for a walk. Don’t stay out here by yourself.” She hated herself for snapping the words, but the panic was making her impatient, and the impatience made her mean.

And Joe just nodded, let her go. He never took it personally when she got mean. _Never used to, at least. What the fuck are you doing to them now, Andromache?_ She lengthened her stride, pushed herself to stalk- not run, but definitely retreat- back towards the house. And then stood there at the end of the driveway, just looking up ahead at the front door. Spent a few minutes contemplating where to go. Not that she’d go inside, pretty sure if she was surrounded by four walls and three immortals and a ceiling right now she’d scream, but she could go around back, head out to-

Voices. There were voices- no, _a_ voice, just one- behind her, back by the river. And for all that Joe was a poet and conversationalist, he wasn’t actually one to talk out loud to himself all that much. Frowning, that tension in her stomach rising once again, Andy turned back the way she’d come. Something wasn’t right.

  
***

  
“We need a plan,” Nicky sat down next to Nile at the table without warning, nearly causing her to throw her two pair, Queens over fives, into the air.

“Plan for what?” Booker was more used to Nicky beginning big discussions without preamble, apparently. He calmly laid down his straight flush, smirking when she eyed the seven of hearts, pretty sure she’d already seen it shuffled through the deck. Son of a bitch.

“For Quynh.”

Booker wasn’t smirking now. Nile carefully lowered her cards to the table and turned to Nicky. “Did something happen?”

Nicky was stoic, as always, but there was a hint of something Nile couldn’t pin down. But it was weird and different and she had the sudden impulse to go completely limp and just slide right out of her chair to the floor. Discreetly crawl away. This conversation was going to be weird and different, and potentially very bad.

“She was close behind us in Finland. She’s trying to find our safehouses. If Andy won’t face it, we have to. We need to have ourselves in order for when she shows up here,” was what Nicky came back with after a pause.

Booker grunted a laugh. “Surprised you don’t have a plan already.”

Nicky raised his eyebrows, and Nile very deliberately didn’t. She slid her phone out of her pocket and held it under the table instead. Ready to text Joe or Andy or… okay, they were all she could. But still.

“I have some ideas, but I haven’t- we all need to discuss it,” Nicky sounded so diplomatic, which meant he was being careful with his tone, which meant _maybe_ he was pissed about something.

Booker was quiet for a minute, gathering the cards back into a pile, shuffling them idly. “So this isn’t you two catching me up after everybody else has already talked?”

“What? No!” Nile looked up then, pivoting between him and Nicky. “Right?”

Nicky rubbed at the side of his face with a sigh. “You’re not being excluded, Booker. Believe it or not, I’m coming to you two first.”

“I’m inclined to not, Nicky. Believe it,” he amended. “You’ve been acting like I don’t belong here for the past four months, so why should I-”

“It’s not that,” he cut back in. “That’s on me, not you. I’m just- it’s not that I don’t want you here. I’m just have trouble accepting it all.”

“Accepting me?”

This definitely seemed like a discussion Joe should be in on (and Andy, but good luck with _that_ , Freeman), and she was just scrolling past Copley’s name to get to his-

“Accepting all of it,” Nicky repeated. “The hundred years wasn’t just about punishment, you know.”

Nile stopped scrolling.

“What?” Booker looked completely thrown. He apparently did not know.

Nicky didn’t look much better. “I would’ve agreed to any length of time Andy and Joe came up with, because it wasn’t just about you. It was about us having the time- and space- to feel safe again. To trust you, and ourselves.”

Booker was frowning again, and there was just enough of that old sadness in him that Nile sat up straighter, gripped her phone tighter. “So you think I came back too early?”

Nicky sighed, rubbed at his face again. So tired. “I don’t know. I want to say no, I really do. But I don’t know.”

Nile’s thumb was still hovering over her screen, over Copley’s contact info. And suddenly his weird phone call last night, and the weird beginning to this conversation, came crashing together in her head. A thousand light bulbs going off. “Quynh’s already here, isn’t she? She found us.”

Both guys’ heads whip around to look at her, and they both have a guarded, almost guilty look on their faces, which- what the _fuck_ they would be having _words_ about that as soon as-

But then none of it mattered at all, because they’d picked a house just far enough outside town and away from other houses that the night was almost always silent around them. And that meant they could hear Andy’s furious yell perfectly. 

_“Don’t you fucking touch him!”_

And things might have been a little messed up for the group right now, but they were still a team, and Nile didn’t even remember the three of them jumping up from the table and grabbing weapons, rushing out the front door, but she knew they did it together.

  
***

  
Sometimes Joe could lose track of time completely. Not just during a singular thing, during a task or a painting or watching Nicky cook. No, he could lose track of days, of weeks and months. Years blurred together sometimes, becoming just vague notions in his brain of ‘that decade when x happened’ or ‘that was the century when y happened.’ He lived through them, let them flow past, and kept living.

The last four months had lasted exactly one hundred and twenty-two days. Twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight hours. Joe could feel every one of them. He was just so tired. Every action, every conversation seemed fraught with everyone’s damage, all piled one on top of the other.

He didn’t move as Andy walked away, instead watching the slow movement of the river. A fanciful part of his brain wanted to strip down and jump in, float along, just to feel weightless for awhile. It would be nice. 

There were footsteps behind him again, and he knew they weren’t Andy’s. He knew they weren’t Nile’s either, and too light to be from a man. Even as his brain connected dots, remembered that specific gait, told him who it was, she was already speaking, and it was too late.

“ _'Y_ _ou’ll be dead again tomorrow/ but in dreams you live. So I try taking/ you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,’_ ” she walked right past him, right up to the water, also looking out at the view. Joe’s muscles were locked, he couldn’t move, he could barely breathe. “ _‘My eyes open, I find you do not follow.’_ ”

She turned then, quickly, so quickly he almost flinched, and she was looking at him expectantly, prompting. It was so instinctive, he heard his own hoarse, faint voice finish the verse. “ _‘Again and again, this constant forsaking.’_ ”

She smiled, and he wanted to cry. He unashamedly wanted to yell for help, for Andy or Nicky, any of them. For Booker to drag him to safety again, for Nile to get in front of him and insert herself between him and danger. He did none of those things, though. He did nothing. He stared at her, so frozen he was sure his eyes hadn’t even widened in the shock he very much felt.

If it was any other time or place or circumstance, he’d still be so relieved. That Quynh was alive and healthy. But this wasn’t that. This was menacing and overwhelming, and not his sister. That energy of hers, that livewire crackle of quick wit and danger, was still there, burning bright at the edges of her. But now that danger was for him, them. For family, not enemies.

Unless that was all the same to her now.

“You don’t look well, Yusuf,” she murmured. 

He choked a little on the inhale, knew she noticed. “Can’t imagine why.”

She shook her head, mournful (but not apologetic), and looked past him towards the house. “Andromache told you not to stay out here by yourself. Has she been telling everyone that, or just you?”

It didn’t even sound mocking, was the problem. She was genuinely curious, if not pointed in her question. He chose not to answer, not trusting himself with the right words. She’d just be able to use them against him, he knew that.

Not that that would stop her. She took a step closer, then another. Her head cocked to the side a little, studying him, moving like a predator approaching prey already caught in a trap. Which was wrong, stupid- he could move. He wasn’t trapped. He could get to his feet and leave, he could, so _why_ -

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so worried about you.” She kept getting closer, but he couldn’t track the movement. Like he was blinking too slowly, and she appeared closer to him each time. Like a flip book with pages missing. And she was all of a sudden right in front of him, and her hand was cradling his face. Gently, like she used to, and like she did in Madrid. 

He gazed up at her, and he wondered what his expression looked like. Frightened? Pleading? Empty? He had no idea. “Please, don’t-”

“You shouldn’t be putting yourself in situations like this anymore, Yusuf. You know better. Leaving yourself open to attack like this, what if someone had come along who wanted to harm you? You’d have been defenseless.” She was _scolding_ him. Scolding him, like she hadn’t been the one to-

“And you- you haven’t harmed me?” he asked, hoping the confrontational words made up for the fact that he still hadn’t moved his face away from her touch.

She brushed her thumb along his jawline, as though emphasizing that exact thing to him. She was literally holding him in the palm of her hand. “I did what I had to do, yes, but don’t think I wasn’t trying to help you too, sweetheart. I only said what you needed to hear. What needed to be said.” She smiled so lovingly. “If only you would listen.”

_“If only you would listen to me, Yusuf.”_

_He shakes his head, or tries to. More like it lolls from side to side on the table he’s strapped to. “Stop.”_

_He’s talking to both of them- to her, leaning back in the corner by the doorway, arms crossed and casual, and also to the sadist prepping the syringe next to him. More of that pearly luminescent blue (and it would be such a beautiful color- robin’s egg or early morning sky- if it weren’t for this). He isn’t sure if it’s fear clouding his vision, or the drugs already in his system, but the syringe looks different this time. Bigger maybe, a different needle. He can’t focus enough to really tell, and it’s already going into his forearm, and it hurts this time, and Joe kind of wants to scream. The dose already in him has been killing him over and over. Hours and hours, years, of being stabbed, beaten, starved, burned, trampled, suffocated, and watching the same happen to Nicky._

_Feeling. Everything._

_It takes him too long to realize the scientist has stepped back, and Quynh has stepped forward. He tries to shift away, but the straps hold him in place, and all he can do is flinch, take in harsh gasps of stale air, as she pets through his hair. He doesn’t want to die anymore today, he doesn’t want to remember anymore, he doesn’t want to-_

_He cycles through six, maybe seven deaths before resurfacing, groaning, his throat now scratched enough for him to know he must have screamed at some point. The room had been all sharp edges before, but now the lines and colors run and drip-drip-drip before his eyes, leaving him with nothing to focus on, nothing to anchor with._

_Except Quynh. For a horrible moment, still reliving a death, he thinks she’s here to help him, rescue him. She puts her hand on his shoulder, rubs at the soreness at the joint she somehow knows is there. “How many of those deaths could have been avoided, sweetheart?” Her voice runs like the colors, his ears as foggy as his eyes. But not so much that he can’t understand what she’s saying, what she’s doing._

_“N-no.”_

_“All those feelings you try to pride yourself for having, they don’t save you. They don’t save others.” Her hand on his chest, over his heart. “This bleeds for nothing.”_

_His hand twitches, and he tries to ball it into a fist, even with the straps holding him down._

_Quynh just shakes her head at it, laughs softly. “Where’s the strength in what you feel, Yusuf? It didn’t save me from the ocean. It didn’t stop Booker from betraying you. It won’t save Andromache, or Nicolò, or-”_

_Another twitch, and he tries to pull free of her, groaning against the spike in nausea as he does. He closes his eyes because he has to, because he can’t do anything else. “No.”_

_“What does it offer, but a distraction? Always the puppy, never the wolf, hmm?” Back up to his hair, petting again, a mockery this time, and he hates how shallow, how childish it makes him feel. “Have the others really never said anything, how tired they are of constantly having to factor how you_ feel _into everything? How long-suffering Nicolò must be to still love you and put up with the dramatics?”_

_“At- at least they still love me,” he stutters out. “They won’t love you after this.”_

_It’s not true, they both know it, he's truly foolish to even try, but there is an ugly little part of him that crows in satisfaction at the flash of anger he can feel in her touch. Worth it, no matter what comes next._

_“Oh sweetheart,” he doesn’t have to open his eyes, he can hear the sneer in her voice, and it hurts enough because she once loved him and he loved her. “Just proving my point, and why I knew you, out of everyone, would be the easiest to take. I knew you’d break before any of the others. I know,” her hand tightens in his hair, “how to beat you.”_

Joe kept himself from gasping, but it was a near thing. He wasn’t back there, he was here. Gdańsk. The safehouse was so close. But Quynh was here too, and her hand was back in his hair just like then. He looked up at her, his vision not blurred by drugs but by tears, and she smiled down at him. He wasn’t sure if she was about to hug him or strike him, and couldn’t stop the full body shudder at her quiet, oil-slick, “Why don’t you just come with me-”

Someone yelled something, he couldn’t parse the words, still foggy, but he knew it was Andy before she’d fully come into his line of sight. She shoved Quynh away from him, then shoved her again, the two of them moving almost in tandem along the side of the road. “You come near him again, I swear I will-”

Joe lost the rest of the exchange, his panic finally manifesting into movement, scrambling back on his hands away from them (from her), only to run into a pair of legs. Three pairs. He was breathing hard, shaking his head, even as Nile came to stand in front of him, between him and Quynh, her gun drawn. Even as Nicky and Booker both leaned down, grabbed an arm and pulled him up to his feet.

“Joe?” Nicky kept his voice low, both hands at his ribs, tightening his grip just a little every few seconds, directing him on when to breathe.

He nodded, and breathed, and brushed his hands through his hair to get the feeling of Quynh out of it. “Yeah. Yes. I’m- I’m okay. I’m here.” He kept breathing, kept his eyes on Nicky, on Nicky’s chest- his perfect, beautiful anchor of a husband- mirrored the inhale, the exhale. He felt Booker squeeze his shoulder, let go, stand next to Nile in front of them. 

Quynh and Andy were still fighting, though it was more circling each other than actual contact, really. Quynh pulled farther back towards the road, and Joe knew what was coming, knew she’d be this prepared. He could hear a car in the distance, knew it was hers. She dodged around a (half-hearted?) punch Andy threw at her. “So conflicted,” she admonished. “Work on that for next time. You can’t keep letting me walk away, Andromache.” 

Joe frowned. Keep? He looked up to meet Nicky’s eyes, caught the flash of a few emotions there that confused him. Nicky was piecing something together that he wasn’t. His frown deepened as they both turned to look at the others, Quynh looking back and smiling that knowing smile. He didn’t have time to wonder further, as the car- black, expensive, custom-tinted windows- roared up along the road, wheels skidding to a halt just long enough for Quynh to open the back door, turn, and blow Andy a kiss. “Until next time.” Then the door slammed shut and she was gone.

The silence that followed felt more like a void, and he was just starting to lean sideways into Nicky, press closer into his hold and pull him closer into his own, when Nile suddenly whirled around. Halfway, so she could see all them. “Shit, how many times has she been here this week?”

Joe frowned again, but was more than mildly concerned when Andy looked away, back at the river. “Andy?” he asked. She didn’t answer.

And she didn’t need to. Nile stowed her gun, then whipped out her phone and brandished it at them all just as fiercely. “You’ve already seen her here, haven’t you?” Not content with just Andy, she waved her phone at Booker and Nicky next. “And you two. Speaking of plans. Were you going to tell the rest of us that you’d been texting Copley about her? You’ve talked to her too?”

He felt Nicky tense up next to him, and couldn’t help the wide eyed look he turned his way. Nicky shook his head, part apology, part I’ll-explain-later, part I-can’t-explain-half-of-this-anyway. Joe had seen the look before, knew from enough experience that whatever Nicky had gone through with her, he’d kept quiet for good reason. That they would talk about later. Joe gave a small nod, squeezed his hand to promise that, and looked at Andy. “You need to stop this,” he found himself saying.

Everybody went quiet. And tense. Two of his least favorite things. But at least Andy was looking back at him now. “Stop what?” she asked, a little bit of warning to her tone.

But he hadn’t meant Quynh. He waved a hand between them, all of them. “ _This_.” Nicky brushed his shoulder against his, and it gave him a little more strength to continue. “Cutting yourself off from the rest of us. It has to end. Now. It’s- it’s dangerous now.”

“I’m a danger to you guys?” she asked, probably misinterpreting him on purpose.

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you not remember what happened the last time one of us repressed their shit instead of-”

“Oh, really? Fuck,” Booker turned to him, glared. “Glad I can be of use as the cautionary tale.”

And Joe- for the first time in months- felt himself rising to match the emotion. “Am I wrong?” he took a step closer. “You could have told me you saw her. I asked you, didn’t I?” Booker’s glare softened a little, but Joe wasn’t done. “I asked you, and you _lied_ -”

“Hey,” Nicky came up to stand next to him, put an arm around him. “Easy, okay?” A stern look at Booker, daring him to argue. “Let’s go inside. She just tried to attack you again, Joe, you should-”

“Jesus _Christ_ , I am so sick of you coddling him, Nicky,” Andy snapped.

And that was apparently all Nicky could take. “ _Fuck_ you, Andromache,” he was even quicker, angrier, cutting off whatever Nile had been about to yell first. “After all we’ve let you put us through lately? You think _he’s_ the one we’ve been coddling?”

Joe swallowed hard, the anger that had been furnaced in him so well just a few seconds ago was completely snuffed out. He was ash inside now. He’d been- Quynh had been?- he’d been right. At least a little. Andy thought he was the weak link, a liability, and was pissed about it. Despite him having agonized over this for months, to have it confirmed in a matter of seconds was… He bit his lip, wrapped his arms around himself, as Nicky was once again forced to defend him and put himself in the path of the storm.

“So what are we supposed to do, if you won’t lead us?” it could be hard to stop Nicky if he was really on a roll, really angry. And he was headed that way now, voice no longer loud and sharp but so measured and calm, it could still feel like the slash of a razor. “If you don’t trust us with yourself anymore, what do we do?”

“How do we trust you?” Booker chimed in, though he didn’t stand up next to Nicky. Still hanging back, eyeing them both warily. “If an attack comes, a real one, from her, are you going to be here with us?”

“I don’t know!” Andy’s voice was raising decibel by decibel, bit by bit. She was past the point where a soft comment or joke would diffuse things. She was at ‘I need time off. I need to go away for awhile,’ and ‘After this, I’m done.’ Joe hadn’t known how to stop it then, and he didn’t know how to stop it now. 

“What do you want to do, then?” Nicky matched every raised decibel with the lowering of his own. “Besides bring the rest of us down with you?”

There were more words exchanged, Joe recognizing the tone and not much more as he tried to pull back a little more. _I need time off_ , he heard in his head again, but it was closer to his own voice instead of Andy’s this time.

Andy, who was currently throwing her hands up in the air and turning away from them. Walking away. And intellectually Joe knew she was storming off, pissed, taking a time out, that’s what she did, but his heart panicked a little at the same time. Because she was sick of them (of him needing to be taken care of) and all this, and she had once said to them _After this, I’m done_ and what if she did again?

Joe really, really hated that he was so… like this, right now. Because he shouldn’t be cowering in the background. He should be in the middle of this, he should be… he should be more alive than he was right now. 

_I knew you’d break before any of the others. I know how to beat you._

Nile was finally yelling now too, standing between Booker and Nicky. Without Andy to join forces against, they had started questioning each other instead. Joe tried to tune them back in, as Booker accused Nicky of planning to ditch him again as soon as Andy died, as Nicky asked Booker what he’d done in the last four months to make things right like he’d once promised.

But all three voices overlapped into cacophony in his ears, making him feel light-headed, foggy, and it was too much like being on that drug again. And just like the last time he’d been on it, he needed to escape. He gathered himself up, glanced at the others still arguing, thought about calling out to- (no, he’ll understand, he’ll know you snuck away and why, he’ll understand, he will) and so Joe wrapped his arms around himself tighter and- like it was the inevitable progression of the last four months- faded away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Quynh and Joe quote is part of “Myth” by Natasha Trethewey - an incredible poet who writes incredible poems about grief and history.


	4. And I Am An Old Phenomenon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some good denouement happens, but not ALL the denouement, because there are still two chapters left and I'm pretty sure (*kicks the tire*) I can get some more drama out of this baby yet.
> 
> A couple warnings: there's a _very_ brief, non-specific mention of suicide in the first scene, and in the second scene there’s an act of self-harm by an immortal- it is **not at all** for self-destructive reasons (more along the lines of field medicine) but could still be triggering. The moment starts with "Joe suddenly understood." and lasts 7 short paragraphs. If you want to skip that, check the end note for a summary of what’s needed for the plot.

“Wow,” Nile piped up. “Do y’all always fall apart this easily when you get put on the defensive?”

Her voice was purposefully light, just like it had been the last few weeks, but her eyes were steely- that fed up air she’d had around Andy now extending to the rest of them.

Nicky found himself pausing, taking a deep breath, somewhat surprised it took such a deep one to get steady- he’d run out of air. Arguing with Andy and Booker. Snapping at them, cutting and angry. Which was… worrisome. 

He realized then that Nile hadn’t asked rhetorically, and Booker looked just as thrown as he was. “No,” he decided to answer. “No. But then, we’ve never been attacked this way before, by someone who really knows us.”

“Except when I did it last year,” Booker added.

Nile’s eyes widened uncontrollably. “Oh. Well. Um,” she glanced around for a lifeline. “Yikes?”

Booker laughed at that, involuntarily it seemed, but it was enough to break the tension. Nile looked more relieved than she should, and Nicky felt a twist in his chest that she’d been so anxious about all of this. About the rest of them. And so, he didn’t argue when she grabbed both of them by the wrist and sat down right there on the ground, next to the river and the road and the site of their great implosion.

Booker must have been feeling just as sorry, because he sat without complaint too, eyeing Nicky in an absolutely awful combination of suspicion and guilt. He wondered if there was a similar expression on his own face. He hoped so. He hoped Booker could tell.

Nile eyed them both. “Can I offer an outsider’s perspective?”

“You’re not an outsider,” Nicky and Booker spoke over each other, insistent and concerned.

She rolled her eyes, fondness evident in the gesture. “No, dummies, I know. I meant an outsider to Quynh. She’s been playing all of us. And you both can’t have spent the last four months telling Joe that whatever she said to hurt him was a lie, and then turn around and believe whatever she said about you.” A shrug. “The end.”

“It’s not always that simple, Nile,” Booker muttered.

“I didn’t say it was simple, just that it’s true,” she countered. “I mean, of course you’re not gonna end up like however Quynh said. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t let you, and neither would Andy or Joe, you wouldn’t let that happen to yourself.”

“The end?” Nicky asked, a half-smile playing out. Nile was increasingly proving that she was really probably too good for them. Too smart for her age, for sure. Too smart for _their_ ages, too.

“Almost,” she glared, playfully, and so visibly relieved that the foul mood from earlier was disappearing. “Yes, you’re better than her, and yes, I love you guys. _But_. You can’t keep shit like _this_ from the group. Not when she’s been so good at picking us apart from the inside. Not when she can just show up like this and attack- shit, Joe, should we go get Joe?!”

“Not yet,” Nicky shook his head, rotating his hand so he was holding her now, stopping her from standing. He’d registered Joe slipping away even as he continued to argue with Booker, and knew better than to do anything about it now. Joe didn’t want attention when he was like that, he needed some time and room to level out. “I’ll go in a bit.”

Booker had been mostly quiet, but now he shook his head too, a deprecating half-smile on his face. “Me I can understand, Quynh’s been able to needle and poke at me before. And I’ve got plenty of weak spots for poking. But Nicky, you’re the steadiest of all of us, what could she possibly have-”

“When did ‘steady’ come to mean having no faults or making no mistakes?” Nicky cut him off, more tired than angry. “Because I have those. More than I think I should.” He looked back at the river. Wondered if the water even bothered Quynh anymore, if she was so far gone that it didn’t even register. “I’ve gathered them for long enough, if I was by myself for five hundred years I’d be feeding off of it all too.”

“What? No way, Nicky, you-”

He shook his head again, stopped Nile from protesting. “You don't know what we were like, after we first died.” That pretty managed to startle Nile and Booker both. “Joe and I. We were different men. You wouldn’t have recognized us. You wouldn't have wanted to.” 

“Different how?”

“Angry,” he started with. _Ruthless, calculating,_ he heard in his head. “Joe was… he was never meant to be a soldier, you know. He’d only joined the war to defend. He wasn’t prepared for everything he saw and did and lost, everything he saw others do. Not just Jerusalem, but the attacks in other cities. _His_ city. His life, his people brutalized and burned to ash.” Nicky looked both of them straight on, refused to allow himself to hide. Talk of their time in the Crusades often centered around Nicky and his guilt, his rehabilitation. Not this time. Nicky wouldn’t let this be forgotten. “He was angry, yes, but traumatized. Quiet, skittish, small. A shadow. And he was that way for years. He was afraid of me and where I’d come from, and not good at hiding it.”

“That’s part of what upsets you now,” Booker guessed quietly. “That he’s… skittish again?”

He swallowed hard. "How did it feel, reliving all your deaths?" Before Booker could get defensive, "Did you feel all of it, all over again? Were you back in your body, or observing from afar?"

Booker's shoulders bent under the weight of what had happened, and where he guessed Nicky was going. "I felt it all."

He looked at Booker, at Nile, straight on. “Do you know how many of those deaths he was forced to relive were by my hand? Or his own? It was relentless. _I_ was relentless. Guilt, pain, frustration, it all manifested as anger.” He let out a breath sharply at the very quiet ‘like Andy,’ Nile then mumbled, and corrected her. “Like all of us. Like Joe in the lab in London. He may sometimes let his feelings out impetuously now, but at least he's not... what he once was. Or wasn't." Nicky shook his head, used some inner reserve of strength to keep his head up. "I took a lot of that anger out on him, whether he realized it or not. I _wanted_ him to be scared of me, if that was the role God had given me to play. And then I spent years taking it out on myself when God didn’t intervene again. I could have lost him many times back then. I did lose myself.” 

“And you think, because Joe is something like that again, that you could be too?” Nile ventured. 

“I do think, yes,” he did feel a little better admitting it out loud. He could still feel the grip of a blade constantly in his hand, never without it- hiding behind it, really, but making it seem like he’d use it at a moment’s notice. The taste of angry, bitter words in his mouth, spat in his cursed companion’s direction, this man who would dare rob him of a life taken in the name of God and- Nicky shuddered. He didn’t like that he still remembered what it had all felt like. How easily he’d been able to cloak himself in it then. _(Easy isn’t always better, Nicolò. Working hard, caring just as hard, it’s important. Isn’t your God supposed to want you to love? You must love_ something _, otherwise what’s the point?)_ “I haven’t forgotten it. If I haven't forgotten it, I could still be it. If I could still be it, then I haven't done enough to fix it.”

"Well, that's definitely not the healthiest way to think about it, but..." Nile pursed her lips, thinking hard. “What changed back then? What brought you out of it?”

“Time,” he answered reluctantly, rueful on his own now. “And… and Joe. He laughed at me.”

“He what?”

“We’d acquired a new horse, one that was also very skittish and I was confident I could control. Was on its back for all of two seconds before it bucked me off, knocked me out. When I came to he was sitting on the ground next to me, laughing. It was…”

“The sun coming out from behind the clouds?” she asked, eyes twinkling. She spent entirely too much time around his husband, Nicky could see that now.

“It was the first time he’d let me see the real him,” he was gentle in correcting again. Because this was important. “After such a glimpse, I wanted to see it again. Keep seeing it. And if he was hiding himself, maybe I was too. I needed to see that real me, whoever that was. So I,” he paused to find the right words, “I got better about myself.”

“I never knew any of that,” Booker spoke quietly, carefully.

“Quynh did,” Nicky brought it back (somewhat) to the issue at hand. It had been something she’d helped them work through by the campfire many years later. “She knew, and she used it well.”

Nile squeezed his hand, offered a smile. “Everyone keeps telling me how I’m going to figure this life out, and grow and change and adjust eventually. Didn’t that happen for you?”

He squeezed her hand in return. “It did. It’s just that sometimes when something knocks you too off course, it’s harder to remember.” More so when done by one of the few people in your life who had ever loved you for being you. 

“If nature and nurture and time are what changed you, then who you are now is who you’re supposed to be. Quynh’s trying to fuck with you, but she didn’t make you into this, so she can’t really take it away.” She let go, then lightly smacked the back of his hand. “Now go get your man. You have thirty minutes before I come looking for a group hug.” Nile paused, then offered up, “Try the roof.”

Nicky inched to his feet, glancing over at Booker. The tension was gone, yes, but the distance was still there. Nicky regretted the way he’d said those words- but maybe not necessarily the words themselves? Maybe Booker didn’t either?

He worked to put the thoughts, feelings, ideas of what he would do to Quynh next time he saw her aside as he made his way into the house, up to their bedroom, out the open window. He swung himself up to the landing, held onto the gutter with one hand, planted one foot on the top of the window frame, and pushed the last few feet up to the roof. Not the easiest spot to get to, but Nicky was pretty sure that was half the point. 

He didn’t see Joe until he was nearly past him, tucked in as he was between the chimney and another angled landing. The blanket wrapped around him was the same color as the brickwork, and Nicky was certain that was on purpose too. And it took one glance at the wear and tear of the blanket, the absence of dust and dirt in just that spot, for him to guess it had been up here with Joe more than once. 

He paused before coming closer, giving Joe time to hear him, and was relieved when he didn’t tense, just offered a small smile and opened the blanket. Nicky moved in closer, sitting down next to him and taking the open half of it to wrap them up together. He maneuvered them around a little more, propped against the chimney, so they could rest their heads against each other’s and watch the sunrise. 

“I’m sorry,” he spoke quietly then. “For my part in upsetting you.”

Joe shook his head without lifting it away. “It was the smallest part, really. I know you. I don’t want you to feel guilty. I just had to… I needed to breathe.”

Nicky brought a hand up to brush through his hair, smiled as Joe’s arms came up to wrap tight around him and hug him close. “I know. A lot is happening right now,” he let them both breathe now, quiet, calm, for a moment. “When Quynh-”

“What did she say to you?” Joe cut him off, which- fair. Enough had gone unspoken.

“I have a feeling you’ve already guessed.”

Joe turned a little, his nose nudging against Nicky’s cheek. “Deflecting, my heart.”

He chuckled low, reluctant. “You know me,” he echoed.

“Of course I do. I know you would never-” he stopped, tried again. “This Quynh, she’s not- she’s...” Joe struggling for words would never not cut at Nicky’s heart. “You’ve been telling me for months that she’s a liar.” His thumb traced the long lines of his ribs, instinctively skipping the spots where Nicky was ticklish.

Nicky slid his hand down from Joe’s hair to the side of his face, did some tracing of his own. “And do you believe me yet?”

“I never don’t believe you,” he said, so utterly sincere. 

But also, “Deflecting, my love,” Nicky murmured, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

Joe looked at him, silent for a few moments before turning fully towards him, their legs bending and tangling together, his hands still firm against Nicky’s sides. “You are not that person, whatever she tried to convince you of. You are _this_ person. This is the person I had a choice in being with and I took it. And had no choice but to fall in love with. And I will not have that questioned by her or you or anyone else that lives and breathes.”

He smiled, because when would Joe’s passion ever not make him smile? “I just worry sometimes. If something bad were to go wrong, truly bad, I could be that man again. If I haven’t done enough to-” Not make up for it, not deserve better, maybe- “Grow from that.”

Joe was quiet again, so quiet, and his voice was soft when he started speaking. “I don’t always believe in a cosmic balance, or destiny- not the way that you do, you know that. But I do… I do think if we weighed the good and bad we’ve done? We’ve been given exactly what we deserve.” _Each other._

“I’ve never doubted that in my ridiculously long life.”

Joe almost laughed, a movement more than a sound. “Even Quynh knows that. She’s been trying to shake all of us, splinter the group- she never once tried to pit us against each other.” He took one of Nicky’s hands in both of his, held tight. “Strongest metal on earth, your heart and mine.” 

Nicky hummed his agreement, tipped Joe’s chin up enough to kiss him softly. “Yes, Yusuf, you are very strong.” He meant it pointedly, and so wasn’t surprised (though disheartened) when Joe flinched just a little. “I mean that, I do.”

Joe was quiet again, eyes cast down to watch their fingers tangling together on Nicky’s lap, tapping an idle rhythm against his knuckles. “You’d- you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If I couldn’t see it, if I needed to fix something-”

“‘Fix’ implies something is broken,” Nicky’s turn to cut him off, and it was imperative. “Implies some fundamental error. Which you do. Not. Have.” He brought Joe forward to kiss him again, on the bridge of his nose this time. “And _I_ will not have _that_ questioned.” 

Joe smiled at that, but his eyes were still distant, still seeking shelter somewhere from what had happened. “You’d have your hands full if you did.”

Nicky bit back a growl. “I am going to have more words with Andy whenever she gets back. I won’t let her-” and then he stopped, because Andy’s words seemed to echo in the air around them. “It’s not coddling, Joe.” At Joe’s blink, surprised (maybe dubious?), “You said yourself, we balance each other. And I want to take care of you because I love doing so, not because you aren’t capable yourself.”

It should have been another moment of absolute relief, of Joe’s eyes lighting up with life, warmth, belief, in that moment. But… there was love there, warmth for Nicky, but Joe’s head was still stuck on Andy and Quynh. “Nico,” he sighed, holding Nicky’s hand close against his chest, leaning forward intently. But not to pull him into a kiss, just to look at him. That intense I’m-drawing-this-in-my-mind look. Usually one of Nicky’s favorite looks. 

“You do not need fixing,” he said again, felt it needed repeating.

Joe was still studying him so intently. “I don’t know where anyone could get the idea that you aren’t the very best version of you. Not a person of anger, or hate, or… Your instinct is to love, and to love me, and that is…” he shook his head, another sigh, and leaned his forehead down on Nicky’s shoulder. “That’s everything,” his voice half-masked by his shirt.

He clasped a hand to the back of Joe’s neck to hold him there, hold him close. “You do not need fixing,” uncaring that his voice cracked this time. He would repeat the words, let his voice shred itself to nothing, however often he had to for Joe to believe him.

There was a shuffling off to the side, the landing over the kitchen, and then Nile’s face popped up just over the ledge of the roof. She sent a questioning look- asking for permission- Nicky’s way. His thirty minutes were up.

Nicky's nod was enough for Nile, as she clambered all the way up onto the roof, yanked at Booker to follow her up, then joined them by the chimney. Joe didn’t straighten up from his position, but he did roll his head to the left and look at them both with a somewhat wary expression, waiting. 

Nile grabbed him by the ankle and gave it a shake. “We’re all at least a little fucked up, yeah?”

Joe offered a smile. “Yeah. At least a little.”

She mirrored it. “That’s the spirit.” And then nudged Booker on the shoulder, raising her eyebrows in a very expectant way, maybe the least subtle she’d ever been (which was saying something, Nicky had to admit).

Booker cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for lying the other day. I just- I didn’t want to see you have to be reminded of those tunnels. And the drug. And what she said to you. I was trying to help.”

Joe nodded against Nicky’s shoulder. “Not telling me just made it that much worse when she showed up tonight, though,” he pointed out not unkindly, even as Nicky hoped (prayed) that this wouldn’t be another hit to his self-confidence. “ _That_ felt like Madrid, when she first walked in and I wasn’t prepared.” Quieter, “But at least then I knew you were with me. That’s what I need more than sparing my feelings, Book.”

“I know,” Booker didn’t offer excuses or more apologies. He looked Joe in the eye and nodded. “And I _am_ with you, Joe.”

“We all are,” Nile added. “I know this isn’t any ol’ trial and tribulation for you guys, so it’s hitting harder than normal, but... I just- I mean... what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

“I’ve always hated that phrase-”

“God, I hate that saying-” Booker stopped and looked surprised to be echoing Nicky. 

He sensed more than heard Joe’s little laugh at that, and lightly pinched his side in retaliation. Joe countered simply by leaning more onto Nicky’s shoulder, pressing his face into it, making Nicky hold up more (most) of his weight.

When he looked up again Nile was watching them all, and she’d really perfected that look of fondness and annoyance and worry and determination. “So what do we do now?”

Nicky felt Joe go still against him, staying quiet. He looked over at Booker, who looked over at him. He looked at Nile, who looked at him. And Nicky wasn’t quiet sure how to answer. Or if he even should. _When did we become your team, huh? When Andy dies, are you going to be the one to kick me out again?_ Booker had asked him earlier. “I-” No, wrong word. “We-”

Booker suddenly looked away from him, and just as Nicky was about to get defensive, frustrated again, he realized Booker’s eyes were focusing on something behind him. On the road leading to the house. Nicky instinctively tightened his hold on Joe as he turned to look. Joe lifted his head with a soft, questioning noise. Booker was getting to his feet, and Nicky made to do the same.

Nile, however, relaxed back against the chimney with a roll of her eyes. “That,” she pointed, “is definitely the type of van an ex-CIA guy would rent, isn’t it?”

  
***

  
Andy must not have gone too far when she stormed off, because it hadn’t taken long for her to reappear after Copley showed up at the house. She drifted in as Copley pulled off his jacket, set up his computer, and she stood back in the corner, arms crossed, eyes only on Copley. She didn’t look at the others. She didn’t take back anything she’d said earlier.

Joe was surprised at himself for hoping she would.

So he followed her lead, and kept his eyes on their guest. Who looked somewhere between amused and nervous. “I, uh, took some initiative, considering the freakishly similar calls and texts I’d been getting from half of you.” And now nobody was making eye contact. “Did some extra digging, ran it by some Interpol friends, and, well…”

He flipped his computer screen around to show the group. A map with moving lines- tracking shipments, it looked like- next to transfers to and from an off-shore bank account. A few mug shots. And… and Quynh. Taken off a CCTV in London last year. Walking with two of the men from the mug shots.

“Trafficking?” Booker guessed in that tone that meant he already knew the answer, just wanted to get the conversation rolling on all the details.

Copley nodded. “Drugs. Weapons.” A hesitation, “People.”

“Shit,” Nile glanced over at Andy who was studying the tracker on screen with narrowed eyes. “And she’s…?”

Copley added another screen, a list of dates. “From what I’ve pieced together, she’s been out of the ocean for at least two years, my guess is closer to three. She was found by-”

“How was I still dreaming about her in the water, then?” Nile broke in.

With the poise of someone who has explained some weird shit in briefings before, Copley just gave a shrug, a shake of his head. “I don’t know. It’s possible that five hundred years with nothing but her own mind allowed her to learn- I’m not sure of the word- projecting? Or,” he glanced at Andy too, much quicker, much more intimidated than Nile. “Maybe it’s what she still dreams about, and that’s what you saw.”

Joe swallowed back the sudden twinge in his stomach and leaned his shoulder more into Nicky’s, felt him press back into his. “What has she been doing in that time?” Nicky prompted, wanting to get them back on track.

Copley nodded, pointed back at the laptop. “She was discovered by this group, either still in the water or a port. England or Ireland, probably. She managed to join them and rise through their ranks fairly quickly. Acclimated to the modern world through them. And then…” He pulled up a news story, kept it on mute, but showed some warehouse fire, police and firemen running in and out of the building. “About eighteen months ago, anyone in power in the organization was killed in an explosion and she took over.”

“She killed them?” Andy asked, her voice sharp.

To his credit, Copley didn’t hesitate. “It certainly looks that way. It’s been lucrative for her. Enough money and dark web contacts to stay under the radar, fund her travels and her searches for you all and the scientist and drugs-” He stopped and turned directly to look at Joe, startling him. “I’ve checked and re-checked. Tripled. All traces of that drug and the DNA research are wiped out. You have my word.”

Joe still wasn’t totally sure he trusted Copley’s word- not because he was a danger, but because Joe just didn’t know enough of his capabilities- but he nodded, not willing to talk about it any more than that. Not now, not in front of Andy especially. 

Nicky purposefully shifted his feet next to him, bringing Copley’s attention over to him and away from Joe. “So what’s happening now? Why are you bringing it to us now?”

Back to the laptop, Copley pulled out the schematics of yet another warehouse. One that was nearby, Joe recognized the address as from the port just a few miles from here. “She’s accepting a shipment tomorrow night.”

“A shipment of…?” Nile asked warily.

He nodded to confirm what she didn’t want to hear. “They’ll be coming into the port, and there’s a window of four hours before they’re moved out again. If you want to confront her, that’s the time to do it, free these people while she's focused on you.”

“Why here?” Booker asked not just Copley, but the entire room. “It can’t be a coincidence. Is she really able to move business deals and- and shipments around that quickly?” He steeled himself for something more, closing his eyes to admit, “When she talked to me, she made it clear she’s known pretty much every place we’ve been in the last four months.”

“How has she been tracking us?” Andy’s voice was tightly wound, tightly controlled. 

Copley definitely hesitated that time, fingers twitching against his laptop. But instead of showing yet another screen, he looked up again, almost apologetic. And he was looking directly at Joe. It took a moment to really realize it, and by the time Joe registered all the attention was on him, he felt Nicky bristling next to him, stepping towards Copley with a fist clenched, and Joe-

Joe suddenly understood. _Oh._ “Someone give me a knife.”

“Joe…?” Nile’s head whipped back and forth between him and Copley. 

Joe’s eyes were still locked on Copley, on his pained, sorry expression. He pushed down the nausea, the panic, the need to hide from everyone. Instead he held out a hand. “Andromache.” 

She pulled a knife out of her back pocket and dropped it into his hand without argument, her eyes confused but not questioning. Joe flipped it open and, without preamble, stabbed deep into his forearm. Right at the spot where, if he looked hard enough, he would swear there was still a mark from that syringe.

Nicky and Booker both moved towards him as if to stop him, but he twisted away with a hissed, “ _Don’t_.” He dug deeper, ignored the pain, the blood flowing past the knife and down his arm. Dripping onto the carpet. Making a mess of things.

Joe ignored it, changing the angle of the blade, until it hit… something. A flick of his wrist and it came free, knife clattering to the floor. He held it up between two red-streaked fingers, a chip of some kind. A tracker. He swallowed again, felt like he could taste it all, the blood and the horror and the heavy silence now filling the room, in the back of his throat. He tossed it onto the table in front of Copley’s laptop, felt a childish burst of anger when it barely made any noise as it landed. “There. Maybe it’ll stop hurting now.” Didn’t even care that his voice broke on the last bit.

He turned away from the chip and walked out. Down the hall. The bathroom. The sink. He needed to clean up. The wound was already closed by the time he got the faucet started, but he took his time washing the skin around it. Once, twice, again. And again, and would have one more time if another pair of hands hadn’t come into view, turning the water off and dabbing at his arm with a towel.

Joe moved back until he could sit against the edge of the bathtub, keeping his arm up and out for Nicky to examine the spot. “At least now we know it wasn’t psychosomatic,” he offered weakly, tried to smile.

Nicky gave him a small smile back, but shook his head. “Hush.” He ran his fingers up and down, wrist to elbow, then sat next to him without letting go. “It was injected-”

“The second dose,” Joe kept his eyes on Nicky’s fingers. “The syringe was different. I thought I was just, just out of it. But it was.”

Nicky kept his hold on Joe’s arm, but leaned in and gently kissed the side of his face. “It was probably pushed deep into the muscle and your body healed around it. That’s why you kept feeling it.”

“So are you saying I need to work out more or less?” he tried again.

Nicky still didn’t take the bait. “Do not let this add to the weight on your shoulders, Joe. Please. Don’t let this be the thing that sinks you. _Please_.”

Joe shook his head, forcing himself to keep any more tears, any more emotions, any more anything from escaping. “I was literally the easy target making it possible for her to hurt everyone, Nicky, I can’t-”

Nicky pulled on the arm he still held, turning Joe to face him. “You weren’t the one doing the hurting, she _used_ you. And now we’re going to fix this. Understand? We’re all going to make sure this stops. I will do whatever it takes, I _promise_.”

There would never be a time this man wouldn’t completely hold Joe’s heart and life in his hand. He kissed him now, knowing that ‘fixing this’ was what Nicky needed to do, needed to swear by. He kissed him again, because he hoped it would promise something in return. And again because he loved him, and again because he needed him, and again. And if they grew desperate, fierce, well, Joe would rather lose his breath gasping and harried because of Nicky’s mouth on his than because of anything on his mind.

He had his arms around Nicky’s shoulders at some point, Nicky having let go long enough to wrap his own around Joe’s hips, hands sneaking under his shirt to press against skin and hold him up. As he always did. When they finally stopped to catch their breaths, Joe licking his lips instinctively to chase the taste just a little bit more, Nicky just smiled, shook his head, knocked their foreheads together. “We’re going to fix what was done to you. _You_ do not fixing,” repeating his little mantra from the roof.

And fuck if Joe didn’t wish in that moment that he could just cure himself of everything wrong, carry his husband upstairs, and forget about the whole goddamn world for a few weeks. But he couldn’t, and wouldn’t be able to for awhile. Because beyond himself they still had to deal with Quynh, and Andy, and whatever was going on with the group as a whole, and it didn’t matter that Joe just wanted to assume the crash position, wrap his arms over his head, and wait this out until the destruction was over.

Because they couldn’t. He couldn’t. And they were all so damn tired.

So instead he let Nicky pull him back up to his feet and walked with him back out into the living room. Copley was just closing up his laptop, nodding to something Booker was saying to him quietly, while Andy stood in the far corner, inventorying their weapons and separating them into piles. The tracker and knife were nowhere to be seen, and Joe was pathetically grateful for that.

Nile was right by the hallway, waiting for them, grabbing Joe’s hand and squeezing it briefly as her quiet acknowledgment while she spoke. “We’ve got a plan pretty much figured out. Taking care of the people getting moved isn’t really a five-person job, so I’m going to go for them while the rest of you have a go at Quynh.”

“By yourself?” Nicky asked. “You don’t need to-”

“Yeah, no, if nothing else it’ll be a good distraction. I mean, I’m the only one she hasn’t approached yet, yeah? Which is either a part of her strategy or she just doesn’t see me as part of the group yet,” Nile was rambling in that pre-mission jittery mode she sometimes still got. “Of course, me angsting about that could _also_ be a part of Quynh’s strategy, so who’s to say-”

“I’m going with you,” Joe found himself saying. He hadn’t known he was about to, but now that he had, it felt right.

“Really?” Nile looked at him closely, and he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t know Copley and Booker- and maybe even Andy too- were now paying attention to their conversation.

Nicky placed a hand lightly at his back. “You sure?” 

He nodded. “There’ll be guards and the crew of the boat, other people working the docks. You should have backup. I don’t think I’m right for- I think I’d be the opposite of a good distraction, if I dealt with her again so soon.”

They all looked to Andy, of course they did, for the okay and change in plan. Andy, moving on to stocking the ammo, gave a nod without looking up. “We can work with that.”

Joe didn’t let that bother him, because Andy had her own pre-mission mood and her intense focus was a part of that, and she wasn’t just dismissing him. She was planning and revising plans in her head, because she was their leader and that was what she did. He would not allow himself to hear an echo of Quynh’s voice, mocking, _how tired they are of constantly having to factor how you_ feel _into their plans..._

They spent the rest of the day with all of them in a pre-mission mode, focused, formulating Plans A through F, sending Copley off that night with his own tasks of coming up with Plans G through J. Joe let it all pass in a haze, not sure who he spoke to if he spoke at all, not sure what he ate besides knowing it was what Nicky had cooked and put in front of him. 

They were quiet that night, huddled in their bedroom, held together tightly under heavy covers. The desperation from before was gone, but the fierceness still there. It was better without words, sometimes. Not something Joe would normally agree with, but for the night, he just needed Nicky _there_ , and Nicky just needed him. It meant they were more settled the next morning, leveled out, prepping and gearing up. And it meant Joe didn't feel any stab of panic when Copley reappeared to drive Andy, Nicky, and Booker to their location.

And it wasn’t a surprise that Nicky snagged him by the elbow before they could split up. Really, Joe purposefully moved a little slower in getting ready so Nicky would have the time to do so. Really really, if Nicky had been a little slower too, Joe would have just stuck his elbow out and placed it into Nicky’s hand himself.

But Nicky did reach for him, pulled him a little ways away from the group, and- and looked at him. And Joe would always be just a little bit more powerless when Nicky was looking at him. The good kind of powerless. Willfully, willingly caught in viridescent eyes.

The time for silence was over. He covered Nicky’s hand with his, hoped his smile was reassuring and not wobbly. “I promise, I swear.”

Nicky raised his eyebrows in that one particular way, the Nicky version of the beginnings of a smirk. “I haven’t asked for anything yet.”

“And whatever it is, I promise,” he smiled a little wider, felt his muscles pull into what almost constituted a grin, and put the promise into it- _I’ll be okay, we’re okay. I love you_.

Nicky sighed, but his own smile started to come out too. He lifted Joe’s arm gently, carefully ran a finger along the smooth skin of his forearm. Completely healed and painless, now. “Then I guess I promise too.”

“You _guess_?” he huffed, indignant, exaggerated. Nicky needed him to show this was okay, that Joe was up to this, so what else could he do? He shoved the twinges of anxiety back down in the pit of his stomach where they belonged, raised his own hands up to tug at Nicky’s vest, fix a few of the straps that weren’t perfectly aligned. “He guesses. We’re departing on the eve of battle, and my beloved _guesses_ he can promise me-”

“Your beloved still doesn’t know what either of us are promising,” Nicky trapped his hands against the vest, held them there. Joe probably couldn’t, but he was going to pretend he could feel Nicky’s heartbeat, strong and steady, through the layers of fabric and Kevlar. “Be safe,” he murmured, much softer.

Joe lifted his thumbs around on top so he could trap Nicky’s hands right back. “I promise?”

Another sigh. “Yusuf...”

He ducked his head a little to catch his gaze, then aligned their eyes and their lips. Kissed him quickly. “I will be. And you will be.”

“Because you promise,” he was mocking Joe a little, but at least the humor was back instead of the worry.

“I think that's how it works, yes,” he kissed Nicky again. “I’m the love of your life, aren’t I?”

Nicky gave him that quiet, perfect, just-theirs laugh. “Damn right you are.” Another kiss, then he purposefully turned Joe back towards the house, towards where Nile was waiting a respectful distance away. “I’ll see you soon.” And then even gave him a light smack on the ass as he left for the car, as much for the shocked look on Nile’s face (they one hundred percent loved that they could still do that to her) as for the genuinely delighted one on Joe’s.

Some things? Some thing were always going to be okay.

  
***

  
It wasn’t that she was eavesdropping again. Nile wasn’t trying to _listen_ in on Nicky and Joe, but she was watching them as they spoke quietly off to the side. She was just, y’know, trying to assess their wellbeing. And definitely trying not to cry as Joe lovingly readjusted the straps of Nicky’s vest, looking so much like when her mom used to fuss with her dad’s tie before he left each morning.

She felt someone at her elbow and managed not to startle too badly. Knowing who it was, since Booker and Copley were stocking up the van, she managed a very calm (impressively so) turn to look at Andy. She was examining the edge of her labrys, in a way that was definitely more about not looking at anyone else. She hadn’t spoken about anything but plans and the mission in the last twenty-four hours. “Hey,” Nile was careful to keep all emotion out of her voice. “You good?”

Andy was way better at the keep-all-emotion-out thing. “We’re losing daylight. We need to get on the road.”

“Andy,” Nile reached for her arm, surprised both of them when she managed to snag it. “We’re all with you. You know that, right? Nothing’s changed there.”

Andy shook her head. “Come on, kid,” disbelieving and so, so tired. She moved off the porch just as Joe reached it. “Everything’s changed.” 

"No-" Nile remembered a different time, back in the lab, the first time all five of them were going to be fighting as a team. Everybody reeling from Nile’s appearance, Booker’s reveal, Joe and Nicky’s torture, Andy’s mortality. _This changes nothing._ She’d said that then. Why did it have to be so different now? Nile stared after her as Andy climbed into the van without a look back. Booker and Nicky both pausing before following, waiting for Nile and Joe to nod, wave, give them the go-ahead.

Joe leaned against the porch rail next to her as the van drove off, both of them quiet. And they kept quiet as they armed themselves, a few extra guns, Joe’s saif on his back, Nile’s throwing knives in each boot. They locked up the house and set off down the driveway, across the road to the river, keeping to the tree line and the shadows cast from the setting sun as they followed it toward the port.

“Tell me a poem,” she finally said, just to test her own voice, make sure she still had one.

Joe glanced at her, surprised. “Which one?”

“No,” she waved a hand, “you pick. You said you used to all the time when you guys still traveled on foot. Tell me a poem that has nothing to do with Quynh or this or anything bad going on.”

And bless him, Joe really obviously tried. He bit at his lips, squinted his eyes a little, but after a minute could only shake his head. “Can’t think of any,” he admitted, and his voice was starting to sound small again, that way he’d been lately, even after the little bit of reprieve since Copley’s arrival.

And shit, that backfired. Nile thought fast, grabbed at his arm and threaded hers through it so they walked side-by-side, determined not to let him retreat into his own head. “I got one, then.”

“You do?” And there was a bit of a smile in that.

So Nile took a deep breath, kept her eyes on the path, the gate around the docks getting closer and closer. “ _‘How much good inside a day?/ Depends how good you live ’em./ How much love inside a friend?/ Depends how much you give ’em.’_ ”

The smile in his voice grew to his face, and he chuckled softly, squeezing at her arm with his elbow so they briefly pressed even closer together. “A great Chicago poet,” he said with a nod. They climbed the gates, keeping to the shadows as they sought out the freighter Copley had pinpointed. “I have some of his original sketches. Remind me next time we’re in Denmark, I’ll give them to you.”

She grinned, even as she pulled her assault rifle free from its strap across her chest. “Remind me to hug you.” Then, spotting the right boat, “There. Third one over.”

“Got it,” Joe adjusted the gloves on his hands. “There’s a rotation walking the perimeter wall, I’ll shadow them from up top.” He started towards it, then stopped. “Twenty minutes round trip, so I’ll never be out of sight or shouting distance. You sure you’ll be okay from here? You give the signal if you need backup and don’t see me, or- oh- I could maybe-”

“I will, I’m good, I promise.” She grabbed him by both shoulders then, suddenly _needing_ him to understand. “I’m glad I’ve got you watching my back. You’re my- I, I know you. I’m glad you’re with me. Okay?”

Joe looked down at her, smiled again a little bashful like he just realized he’d been rambling. “You’re pure starlight, mini-Boss. I love you.” Then he kissed her forehead, light and quick, and scaled the wall behind them before she could respond.

God, she could only imagine the shit he must say to Nicky before they split up for missions.

Speaking of missions. Nile cleared her throat and her head after a second, and continued on, sneaking her way up the… ramp? Gangplank? She was not great at boats. Copley’s intel had the shipping container just below deck, and Nile managed to sneak down the steps between guard rotations and find the container in fairly good time.

But it was almost silent in the storeroom or boat warehouse, whatever the fuck you called this room. And Nile knew it was reinforced steel, but she was pretty sure some noise should be coming from inside it. Thirteen men and women, they should be… Right?

She gripped her gun a little tighter, pulling hard at the lever that kept the door of the container shut. It swung open a lot quieter than she’d expected, maybe a part of her had hoped for a really squeaky hinge and a nice, creepy, cliched metallic screech as she shoved it open.

It was empty. “Shit.” And not empty as in the people had already been moved. “ _Shit_.” Empty as in no one had ever been in there at all. Like this whole thing had been a-

She didn’t even have time to curse again. There was a noise behind her and to the left, and something heavy was already swinging at her head by the time she turned. And Nile was already unconscious by the time she hit the ground.

  
***

  
Nicky absolutely did not sigh when Copley pulled the van to a stop at Point Alpha and Andy immediately jumped out and shut the door behind her. He didn’t sigh, but he did look up and meet Booker’s eyes through the rearview mirror. 

Booker just raised an eyebrow and offered a salute. And so Nicky did sigh out a “Thanks,” as he opened his own door. 

Booker offered him an extra clip of ammo in consolation. “See you at the next point.”

He lifted the clip in his own salute. “Thirty minutes.” Another nod to Copley, because he’d worked hard for them- for Joe- with this and Nicky felt like being polite to _someone_ at least, and then he followed after Andy.

They moved in silence which, admittedly, was customary for them. Nicky forced his mind away from the tension in his head, his jaw, in the air between them, and focused on the mission. They were approaching one of the main buildings in the warehouse section of this port, where they’d figured Quynh’s base of operations to be. Andy and Nicky approaching from the west, Copley driving Booker around to come in from the north while he parked a safe distance away and ran surveillance from the van.

“Maybe having a tech guy on hand for jobs wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he mused quietly, trying to find something neutral they could talk about.

“Something for you to think about in the future, I guess,” she replied, her tone just on the lukewarm side of cold.

“Damn it, can you just be _you_ for one day?” So much for neutral. “Please?”

“What-”

“I get that anything to do with Quynh is hard. Is unbearable for you. I get that, and understand that you need to figure out how to cope. And I would do anything to help you. But for you treat the rest of us as you are isn’t- it isn’t right. And it’s not you.”

“Look, I’m sorry I snapped about Joe, okay? I didn’t mean-”

“This isn’t you either. _You_ would say this to Joe, not me. You’d talk to him, instead of let him struggle with his worth like this. You wouldn’t let him question his own place with us.”

Andy froze for less than a second, but just long enough. “He’s not-”

“He is. He thinks he is, at least. Booker is too. And Nile. We’re all-”

“All? I don’t think that’s true, Nicky. Not for you, right?” 

His turn to stop. A small, petty part of him wanted to blame Booker for this, but that was too easy and too misguided. “I don’t understand. I don’t want to be in the charge of the team, I’m not trying to be.”

“I know,” she surprised him. “It should be you and Joe together, at least for awhile. Until everything’s settled.”

“No,” he insisted. “None of us want to replace you, Andy. Not in any way. Or any time.”

“Lead by committee, then,” Andy nodded instead, crouching to clip at the fence around the perimeter so they could crawl through. “For a couple hundred years or so, until Nile wants to be in charge. Smart.”

“Andromache…” he growled, warning.

“You guys will have to keep up her training, you know. We haven’t had time to work on transpo skills. Get her good at hotwiring, horseback, all-terrains, maybe some piloting would be good. There are schools she could enroll-”

He waited just long enough for her to get through the fence after him, then yanked the knife from her hand, getting her attention. “We are not doing this. We’re not doing the bequeathing speech or the ‘get everyone ready for death’ speech, or any of them. Damn it, Andy, just because you’re going to die doesn’t mean it’s happening every day until then.”

“Nicky,” she tried to roll her eyes and shoulder past him, but he grabbed her and yanked her back around, staying just out of reach of her own instinctive elbow jab.

“No,” he snapped. “No. Be with us now. You’re going to die? Yes. We’ll deal. Stop treating us like we’re already dead to you.”

Andy stared at him, and he could see it, he could _tell_ this was getting through to her. Why wouldn't she just admit it? Why wouldn't she just... be with them? The anger he had at her, Quynh, Booker, this situation, was all simmering below the surface, and Nicky took a moment to shove it all back down deeper, ignoring the echoes of Quynh’s voice in his head, _Booker can’t be trusted to have your back, Andromache can’t be trusted to lead, You don’t want to revert back to old ways, do you?_

Maybe Andy could see that on his face, he wouldn’t really be surprised. Her face darkened at the same time that her eyes went bright, and for a moment Nicky could actually feel the pain and helplessness and frustration she was battling every waking minute. “Andy, please,” he tried. “Just be you. We just want you.”

She blinked hard, once, twice, and then physically shook the emotions off her face. “We have to meet Booker at Point Delta in twenty minutes. Come on.”

“Andy-”

“The mission, Nicky. We’ve got a job to do first.”

They walked on in silence again. There wasn’t that tension between them now, but the absence of it somehow felt more like failure. He wondered if his own eyes were too bright, too frustrated. Probably.

“Which do you think is worse,” Andy said in that perfectly mild and awful tone, “that Quynh thought she could get to us by sabotaging the group against each other, or-”

“Or,” Nicky cut in a half-step behind her. He’d always put himself a half-step behind her, in thought and in action. “That it appears to be working?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Nile quotes is “How Many? How Much?” by Shel Silverstein.
> 
> Summary if you skipped the warned part: Joe learns from Copley that Quynh had put a tracker in his arm when he’d been captured. He removes it himself.


	5. Sharpen Canine Teeth, Get Those Ringside Seats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Quynh unleashes her full ‘bad guy from an 80’s action movie’ potential and I have way too much fun coming up with ridiculous traps and machinations. Shit’s going downnnnnn.
> 
> Warning for (temporary) drowning in the last bit of the last scene. If that triggers, skip the last six paragraphs.

  
Plan A was not off to a great start.

“Do you know where the word villain comes from? Originally?”

He hadn’t even been there ten minutes. It took him longer to make coffee in the morning. “Yes.” He hadn’t even had time to get into position.

“It’s French,” Quynh said anyway. She’d been waiting just around the corner from the drop-off point, leaning back against a wall, one ankle crossed over the other. If nothing else, she was a master of pushing every fucking button a person could have.

“I know.” His buttons were pushed.

“It used to mean ‘one who comes from a village.’”

“I know,” Booker repeated, gritting his teeth. Holding still, because while his hand was resting on his gun, Quynh’s was already out and pointed at him.

“A peasant. Do I seem like a peasant to you?” She managed to keep the gun pointed at him and wave it around herself at the same time. “Everyone will want to call me a villain, but I’m a king.”

“How very gender-progressive of you,” he grumbled.

She just smirked. “I’m in charge. This is my reign. This. All of this. More. I rule over it all. I _should_ rule over it all. You agree, don’t you? It took me, what, six days to establish my rule over all of you?” His grip on his gun tightened. He wasn’t cowed this time around. He was pissed. That’s what she wanted to call everything she’d done to Andy and Nicky and Joe? And she saw that twitch of his hand, of course, and laughed at him. “You think you can draw on me before I shoot you?”

“No,” he stepped to the left when she did, half-circling, not wanting to give her any advantage. “But a big part of me wants to try anyway.” 

“That would be pretty foolish. I’d kill you first.” She cocked her head to the side, and the fact that she was enjoying this so much managed to piss him off even more. He took a step back when she moved a step forward. “Which do you think would be more _villainous_ of me- waiting for you to wake up just to immediately kill you again over and over, or letting you wake up completely alone to wonder where I’ve gone, who I might be aiming at next?”

“Both options are pretty shitty,” he agreed. Another step back and to the left. “I can’t pick something else?” He saw it again, as he’d been seeing it every time he closed his eyes the last twelve hours: Joe tossing that bloody tracker onto the table, the look of shame on his face. _Shame_. “Because I really want to shoot you.”

Booker would be able to look back later and know that the discovery and removal of that tracker had been the moment he snapped. He was done, and he was angry. He’d spent entirely too long feeling sorry for himself and for the state of his world, and he'd thought that was enough, that that was his penance. But it hadn’t done a damn thing to help him or anyone. It hadn't done anything to stop Joe from getting that look on his face. No, he’d promised Nicky he would do something to make things right and then promptly buried his head in the sand. How many times had he seen Joe rub at his arm, and not thought that it- that it could be real. Could be because of _her_. 

Quynh’s smile was so pleased, eyes bright, and Booker- Booker, for just a second, was convinced that she really was enjoying this. Not toying with him, but _talking_ with him. She was enjoying having someone to talk to. Maybe because he wasn’t one of the garbage assholes who worked for her, or maybe because he was an immortal like her.

No, not like her. He wasn’t like her. He refused to become like her. 

“It wouldn’t turn out the way you'd want,” she almost startled him before he realized she was still talking about a shootout, not his shitty attempt at self-growth. “Do you really want to report back to everyone that you failed?”

“Do you really want to keep playing the snake in the Garden of Eden?” he snapped back.

She grinned. “Oh, I like that one. That’s good. I’ve been called a snake before, but not quite so as infamous a one as that.”

“Is that what all this is about? Infamy?” Another step back, and fucking hell, Booker was an idiot. She was herding him somewhere. Motherfucker-

She laughed again, his realization must have shown on his face. “What was I just saying about failure?”

He wanted to glance back to see just where she was trying to get him to, where he was in relation to Andy and Nicky’s drop-off point, but he didn't want to spot them and accidentally tip her off. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“You know if you fuck up again, that’s it. End of the line, no matter how long you've been able to stretch it so far. They must have a plan for it, just in case. Maybe two- one for your drinking, one for your betrayal. Either way, you know Andromache will never let you see the others again if that happens. And,” there was a warehouse at his back, south-southeast. She was moving them in that direction. “You’ll have to live with yourself all over again. Fun pattern there, right? Every time you’ve been left alone, it’s really been your own fault.”

The problem, really, was that she had a silencer on her gun. He’d make a run for it, or pull his own, didn’t care if she killed him, but the others wouldn’t hear the gunshot. He wouldn’t be able to warn them in time. She would get to someone else, and he couldn't stomach that. Better to keep her here with him, figure out what she was up to, than let her sneak up on any of the others. “I don’t drink anymore.”

“Sébastien,” she said it sternly, scolding, and he really wanted to kill her a few times. “You might think that now, but we all know you’re maybe one broken shoelace away from saying screw it and picking up a bottle again.”

Booker decided right then and there that no matter how this ended, even if she surrendered and repented and all was right in the world again, she was doing a fucking lot more than a hundred years of penance.

  
***

  
Nile woke up with an aching head, blood drying on her face with no wound, and a desperate need to punch something. She didn’t even know specifically what yet or why, but ooh did she want to hit something. And she would have if her hands weren’t otherwise engaged, handcuffed as they were above her head to a pipe. A very large pipe, running the length of the wall just above where she sat.

A very large pipe in a small metal room, no windows… probably still on the ship, judging by the slow up and down she could feel below her. _It’s a cell_ , she realized, really, really, very much wanting to punch something. Preferably one of five… nope, six, that was six distinct footsteps stationed outside the door. Her guns were gone, plus her new throwing knives, son of a _bitch_.

She loved those knives. Joe and Nicky had gone to Japan specifically to get them for her, maybe a week before Quynh’s first strike. She’d made just enough Kill Bill references about Hattori Hanzō that a movie marathon was required, and even Andy had sat through the whole thing. That plus the two of them teaming up to beat the guys at a popcorn throwing contest, and it was… it was maybe the last great, sweet, perfect family memory Nile had before the afternoon that Joe stepped out to go to the market and never came back. 

And now here she was. She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious for, no idea how long until Joe would know something was wrong, or how long it would be until that door opened and Quynh walked in, or, way worse, until she walked in with one of the others (all of the others?) at her mercy. Or maybe the door will never open, ever, and she'll be stuck like this for- 

Nile pulled at the cuffs, knowing it was useless and doing it anyway. She had to do something, she had to- “Hey!” she yelled out, hoping the guards could hear her through the metal. “Tell your boss I want to talk to her!” No reply. “Hey!” Nothing. 

She was just starting to calculate the very obvious odds that this shipment had been a setup from the beginning when the sound of an explosion reached her. Small, contained, and probably on the deck above her. Joe? Only one or two gunshots but a lot of voices cut off mid-yell. Like they’d been stabbed. Or scimitared. Definitely Joe.

She yanked at the cuffs again. The sound of fighting was getting closer, she could hear the voices of the guards outside (which meant they had definitely heard her earlier, those jerks), rushed footsteps, the clang of a ladder, the beginnings of a scuffle just outside the-

The second explosion was very much not above her head. Instead it blew out one of the walls of her cell, sending steels beams and plating crashing to the floor and debris flying in every direction, the smoke and shock of it punching Nile in the chest. “Shit, what-” she blinked as much of it out of her eyes, watering and stinging, as she could. “-The fuck?”

She could now see the cell she’d been in was part of a larger room- was this on the same level as the container had been? Or deeper? There were more pipes. Lots of smoke. Heaps of sheet metal and gnarled, twisted material from the bomb (this one fore sure hadn’t been as controlled as the first, Booker would be rolling his eyes at the whole tableau) littering the entire space, the bodies of four guards scattered and-

“Ah Jesusfuckshit,” a voice muttered from the piles of destroyed wall next to her. “Ow.”

She knew the voice, and the curse, and the very grumpy tone that combined the two. “Joe?” she called out softly, weirdly worried about setting off another explosion.

“Hmm?” The piles of rubble didn’t move, but she could see two feet slowly poke out from under a steel beam. 

She cleared her throat, wondered if she was still feeling the effects of the head wound, because this struck her as very funny and she had to fight not to laugh. “Do you need me to rescue you?”

One boot twitched, like he was trying not to laugh too. “Nope. All part of the plan.”

“Blowing yourself up?”

“Provide foolproof distraction. D’you see those fools that were here before? Distracted.”

“Oh boy,” she twisted her wrists in the cuffs again, just for something to _do_ because she hated being stuck. And because she knew Joe tended to get more quippy when blood loss was involved. “How close are you to bleeding out?”

“No, no,” she could hear the hand-waving in his tone. “This’ll close up way before then.”

“Mm-hmm,” Nile eyed the rubble skeptically. “So what’s the catch?”

A well-timed, very suspicious pause. “I’m stuck.”

“Oh boy,” she said it again. “Steal beam?”

“Little bit.”

Nile looked up at the ceiling, prayed for strength. “Should we first discuss why you thought blowing up a wall on top of yourself would be a good idea? Hmm?”

“No no nope. This one wasn’t my idea. I did the one up top. Very meticulous. ‘M good. This was stupid guards ’n stupid grenades. On a _ship_. Why.”

“I don’t know,” she answered, overly consoling. “Honestly, though, I thought this was gonna go way worse, so…”

“Oh, about that?” Joe’s feet shifted around, like he was bracing himself, trying to move something, then suddenly stopped. “Ow. Nope, bad idea,” he muttered so quietly she could barely hear him.

“About what, Yusuf?” she brought his attention back to her. And whatever bad news he was about to deliver.

“They put this cell in one of the ballast tanks. And all the locks I could find were made to lock from the outside.”

And really, it was thanks to that bit of information- and the fact that Nile wasn't actually sure what exactly a ballast tank was- that she didn’t completely start to panic a few moments later when a loud screeching noise echoed through what was left of the cell, and all those many pipes around them suddenly started pouring water into the room.

  
***

  
Booker allowed Quynh to back him into the warehouse, trying to keep an eye on his surroundings, any hint of whatever she had planned as they moved. He kept his hands out and to the sides and kept his anger (mostly) in check. For now.

The room they now stood in used to be a storeroom. He could see where there had once been shelving units along the floor, bolted to the walls. The only thing bolted there now were shackles. Cuffs, just like the ones he’d seen four months ago. And at that Booker stopped and stared. Not because of a flashback, but because… there were only two sets. Not three, not five. Had Quynh thought they’d split up differently?

Or had she thought not all of them would have come at all?

_What if she planned this part wrong?_ Suddenly bolstered by that, going on instinct, he turned back to Quynh, who was already looking suspicious at the new expression on his face. “I can’t believe this is going to be the thing that brings you down,” he said thoughtfully. Just casual and confident enough to push her buttons, see how _she_ liked it. (If he couldn’t drink anymore, maybe adrenaline could be his new addiction. Adrenaline and smugness. Oh fuck, this was what would turn him into Andy, wasn’t it?)

“Excuse me?” She didn’t so much as twitch, but at least he had her attention.

“It’s just," he chuckled. "Yes, you’re great at figuring out exactly what makes each of us hate and doubt ourselves. You played us, right? And you did it beautifully. Thousands of years, it’s still so easy to make those three blame themselves for anything that goes wrong, isn’t it?”

“I-”

“But you forgot, or maybe you just don’t get it anymore, that no matter how much you make them hate themselves, they’re still going to love each other- _you_ \- more than that.” He didn’t take a step back when she stepped forward, because this wasn’t about stopping an attack anymore. This was just about stalling for time. And, okay, gloating. A little. Maybe. “I know we only met last year, but remember, Quynh, I spent nearly two hundred years with your dreams.”

“And?” she snarled, looking around, maybe assuming this was part of a plan, a trap.

But no, Booker was simply throwing caution to the wind in the stupidest way imaginable. (Joe was going to give him such _shit_ for monologuing about _love_ to the bad guy, dear _God._ ) “And that means, I know- intimately- how much you loved them. How the memories of them kept you going for centuries. Maybe you never went completely mad down there, and they’re the reason why.”

“You don’t-” 

“You want examples? Okay. You kept a couple of them close to your heart. The first time Andy smiled at you, really smiled, not because of a battle you’d just won or wrong you’d just righted. She looked over at you one morning and smiled for no reason and you’ve never forgotten that.” She took another step forward. He didn’t move. “A time Nicky died protecting you in a fight. He hadn't even done it instinctively, he'd seen what was happening and made the choice to put himself in front of you. And that time Joe comforted you when some stray cat you’d been feeding ran away, spent hours trying to cheer you up by making up stories about the adventures the cat was going on.”

Quynh’s gun hand wavered. Not a lot, not as much as maybe he’d like, but there had been a tremor, and they both knew it.

Booker wasn’t quite brave enough to smirk, but he raised an eyebrow pointedly. “Maybe you and I are a little alike. We’ve both fucked up and tried to throw them away. And I know you know that those three aren’t perfect, but they’ve saved us a hundred times over just by being with us.” He let her get one more step closer. “And here’s the thing I know you don’t get- No matter what pain and torture you bring on them, they'll still look at you and see their family. It's awful, isn't it? Hurts. They won’t stop loving you no matter how much you fuck up. They can’t fucking help it, even if they _should_.”

He really hadn’t thought any of this through, so it caught him by surprise when she lashed out, striking with her gun hand, clocking him across the face with both the weapon and her fist. He was knocked to the ground, blood dripping into his eye as he looked up at her. She holstered her gun and drew a knife out instead, and he was maybe about to second guess everything he’d just done, maybe his entire life, when another shot rang out, bullet hitting the floor at her feet, pushing her back a few steps.

Andy was next to him now, gun out and pointed at Quynh, and it was Nicky who grabbed Booker’s arm and hauled him up to his feet. And kept pulling, until Booker was in his arms and registering the fact that Nicky was hugging him. He wasn’t always as physically demonstrative with others as he was with Joe, not really, but when he did, it was-

“There is no ‘should,’” he insisted quietly, just for Booker to hear. “You’re our brother. I may want to stab you with a sword sometimes, but there will never be a ‘should.’” Then he let go, steadied him, and his eyes had turned hard and determined by the time they turned to focus on Quynh. 

She had backed away a bit more as Nicky and Andy flanked Booker. She hadn’t gone for her gun, the knife still held up almost reflexively, like it would deflect bullets. Like she would be able to- Damn it, no, Booker had underestimated her yet again. They all had. Again. Quynh was backing away, yes, but in a purposeful direction. Towards the wall at the far end, towards the-

“Ah fuck, she’s- Andy-!” Booker didn’t even know what he was yelling, but he knew he needed to, because Quynh was moving fast now, slamming her hand on a panel at the wall. She was outside the actual storeroom, that’s what it was. And when she hit the switch, a vertical panel door slammed down between her and them, locking them in. “Fuck.”

Andy went for the door, tried to find access, a bit of leverage, anything. She turned back to Nicky and Booker and confirmed no escape with the shake of her head. “Yeah. Fuck.”

“How _easy_ did you think this was going to be?” there was a click, and then Quynh’s voice coming through a speaker over Andy’s shoulder. Booker selfishly wanted to think she sounded a little shaken because of his little tirade, but he couldn’t be sure. She was definitely angrier than he'd ever heard her before, maybe a little less in control of herself.

He hoped.

“Quynh,” Andy’s voice was just as angry and just as maybe shaken. “Just… just let me-”

“You’re all so proud of yourselves, aren’t you?” Quynh ignored her. “Still one big happy family.” And then her voice took that tone again, the one that Booker hated, that had Nicky tensing up next to him, that had Andy instinctively reaching for her axe. “Except, oh, you’re not all here, are you?”

Booker went cold, all over and all at once. Nile and Joe. “No,” Nicky let the word escape near-silent in an exhale. 

“Fuck!” Andy smacked her hand against the door. “No, Quynh, don’t _do_ this.”

“What on earth do you imagine I’m doing, Andromache?” 

Nicky suddenly came to some realization and moved forward like a lightning strike, examining the door panels and the wall around it. “There’s no seams,” he muttered.

Booker looked at him, confused, as Quynh continued. “Just because I want to gloat a little? Because maybe I’ve been right these past five hundred years- you can’t even protect your own. Just like you couldn’t with me.”

Andy almost seemed to crumple under the weight of it. Booker reached for her, grasping onto her elbow, just as Nicky turned back to them, eyes wide. Worried. “There’s no seams anywhere. The room's air tight.” He swallowed, locked eyes with Booker to drive the point home. “We’re sealed in.”

  
***

  
“Ow.” He tried to shift upwards, dislodge the beam from his ribs that way. It dug in deeper. “Ow.” Another attempt to lift it straight up and slide left from under- “Ow.”

“Stop. Ow’ing.” Nile called over, her voice still on the good side of steady, easy to hear over the rush of water. And maybe that was half the reason Joe was doing it, but if it kept her calm, he’d do a hell of a lot worse than bleed an extra pint. 

And if it helped him keep his own mind off the rising water, now starting to sweep over his chest and forcing him to tilt his chin up just above the water line, that was smart thinking too. “It bothers me,” he admitted, “that I can’t figure out if this was Quynh’s Plan A or fallback. Sinking the ship.”

“It’s very dramatic, if so,” Nile ventured.

“It’s very Quynh,” he muttered, unsure if he wanted Nile to hear that or not. Then louder, “How’s it coming?” Water was lapping past his neck now, getting colder (and more annoying) as it started to soak into his beard.

“Almost done, I promise, don't worry,” she grunted. Joe had talked her through breaking a thumb to get a hand free of her cuffs, and she was able to take it from there with a lock pick set tucked in her belt. “I just need to- You doing alright?”

"'M okay," up to his chin, even with it lifted up parallel with the ceiling. "I'm..."

"Joe? Come on, hey, don't-"

Joe couldn’t hear the rest, the water finally rising up his face, past his mouth and his last deep pull of air, past his ears and blocking Nile’s voice. He laid back and held still, kept his heart rate as slow as possible. This? This was nothing. Not even close to the worst thing he'd ever been through. This was temporary. Nile was good, Nile would get free, Nile would be there soon-

There were quick movements, water displaced near his feet, then at his side. A hand- Nile’s, some part of him pleased that he recognized it right away- grabbed his hand briefly, then moved it to the beam pinning him down, placed it at a specific point. Joe added his other hand, saw hers join him right past the center fulcrum point, and together they shoved and pushed, Joe using the last of his air, nowhere close to worrying, this would be fine, this would be-

The beam moved, first an inch, then a few more, and Joe was able to wiggle free, propelling himself back and up, taking in air before spots could start clouding his vision. He sat back against the rubble around him, uncaring that the water still came up to his chest, giving himself the time to catch his breath, let his side stitch itself back together.

Nile knelt down next to him and put a hand against his chest. Her eyes were wide but getting less wild by the second, with at least one crisis averted. “Okay?”

He nodded, schooled his face into something bored, confused. "Of course. Why, were you worried?”

She rolled her eyes, tapped her fingers against him, then stood back up. “You suck at rescuing.”

He pouted. “You suck at not needing to be rescued.” And then let her help him up to his feet.

“I got out of the cuffs on my own!”

“See, all part of the plan,” even as he kept up the teasing, he started eyeing the pipes, the angles of the room, possible escape. “Provided motivation, didn’t I?” Both of them standing, the water was just about reaching Nile’s hips, and Joe wasn’t confident they’d be getting out anytime soon. He was pretty confident of the opposite. “Vest off,” he decided, pulling his own Kevlar off. “And anything heavy you don’t need.”

“Really?” Nile asked, even as she immediately discarded hers, as well as her now-empty holsters. _It’s going to come to that?_

"Possibly." Joe dumped most of his weapons too, re-strapping his saif to his back, and lead her over to the nearest hatch, the one he’d come down to find her, the one she'd probably been brought down too. Even knowing it was locked from the other side, he tried it anyway, then the door a few meters over, shoving at it a few times with his shoulder. “I wonder if the whole thing is actually sinking or it’s just this tank.”

Nile tried another door, finding no give in the hand wheel, dropping back down with a splash. The water was up to her chest, then her shoulders. “It’s probably better, yeah? To be sinking here at the harbor than out at sea.”

It was, actually, and Joe knew that, but it caused a little stutter in his heart, wondering if Quynh’s plan _had_ been to drown them at sea. Or, if the boat was still functional, was her intention to take it somewhere with them stuck drowning in the hold, kept in place? Floating helpless like fish in her own personal aquarium? He didn’t know. He didn’t have an answer; he wasn’t sure he knew this Quynh anymore, not enough to know. He didn’t _know_.

Had she really meant this trap for Nile, or possibly for him? For Andy? Nicky?

“Hey,” Nile was back at his side, drifting into him a little, and probably on purpose, as the water finally lifted them both clear of the floor. “What- what do we do now?”

He shook himself free of dark thoughts. Nile needed him. He needed to be at his best, not whatever mess Quynh (and his own head) had tried to make of him recently. “Now,” secretly relieved that his voice sounded as strong and sure as he'd wanted it to, “we don’t panic.”

“Oh?” Nile glanced around as she kept herself afloat next to him, then looked at him again. Joe made sure to project determination, not resignation. Even as she finally realized what he meant. "…Oh.” Even at the guilt he felt that he couldn't spare her from this, at the knowledge that she'd be going through this eventually whether either of them wanted her to or not. 

He hated how small she sounded in that moment, and pushed on with his voice just as warm and steady as he could, the voice Nicky called his 'lost children and stray animals love me' voice. “It’s instinct when you first wake up and you’re still underwater, the panic. That’s natural. It’ll happen, and that’s okay. Okay? I’m going to be fighting against it too.”

“You’ve done this before?” she still sounded shaky, but less so. Good.

He nodded, barely avoiding swallowing the water splashing at his face. “Few times. As soon as you’re aware, find a focus and count the seconds. See how high you can get. Each time try to get a little higher.”

“H-how many times do you think we’ll…?”

They were high enough that he could reach up and touch the ceiling if he wanted. He did not want. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. Unwilling to lie. It was worse to lie. But it wasn’t good to be helpless either, not when he knew the others were nearby, not when he had so much faith in Nile herself. “But we’ll get through it, mini-Boss. Of course we will. It won’t be forever, I promise. We’ll get through it.”

Nile sucked in a few breaths, and he watched her painfully push back the panic again. “Find a focus?”

He smiled, this time using his 'lost children and stray animals and Nicky love me' smile. “Find a focus. A spot on the wall, something in your pocket, anything you can hold onto.”

Nile immediately reached out and grabbed his hand. “Got it.” His smile got more genuine, and then even more so when she let go for a moment, reached down into the water and pulled her belt free, and cinched it around their wrists together. “In case we let go,” she offered, doing her best.

And her best was so _good_ , and Joe just wanted to hug her and not let this happen to her, not now and not ever and not here and not because of Quynh, she'd never get to know the Quynh from before, the real one, the one they loved, and- Focus, Yusuf. Focus. He regripped her hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “We’ll get through it,” he promised again. Promised himself, too. Then nodded towards the hatches above them. _Inches_ above them. Inches of air left. “While we count, we’ll keep looking for weaknesses, anything that might open up. Pressurization could affect something. The flooding could cause another ballast tank to open. Or the others will come find us. One of those _will_ happen. We’ll get through it.”

“We’ll get through it,” Nile echoed. Both of them had their heads tilted up now, into the last pockets of air. Joe could feel it, the building pressure against his chest from the water, the small, repetitive surges of fear cresting like waves in his stomach. He fought them down as the water kept rising and finally- in an act of frustratingly, chillingly quiet _nothing_ \- sealed the room around them, taking away the last of the air.

He kept his hand tightly clasped with Nile’s, rubbing his thumb along hers in a slow, practiced move. A focus. With the tank fully pressurized, they tried once again to move the hand wheel on the hatch, but it still wouldn’t budge.

The water’s bluish-grayish-blackish haze was like a cloud over his ears and eyes, and if Joe hadn’t had Nile’s hand in his he probably would have started thinking of how it reminded him of being drugged and helpless. He wasn’t helpless now. He had Nile with him, he had the rest of his family nearby, he wasn’t- this wasn’t the end. 

He wasn’t helpless, but there was really only so much he could do, and their time was running out. He wasn’t sure which of them convulsed first, a short burst of jolts as the body demanded air to bring in and only found water, as the water surrounding their outsides also claimed them inside, but Joe used the last of his brainpower to squeeze her hand tightly, instinctively trying to push her upwards, towards where _safe_ was supposed to be. He could feel her weakly trying to pull him and do the same, as though they were fighting over which of them got to drown first.

Not that it mattered. A few cruel, crawling seconds later, and both hands let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit where it’s due: I blatantly cheated/borrowed some lines from episodes of “Legion” and “Justified” for Quynh in the first scene. But it felt right? Moral of the story, kids- cheating’s great, actually.
> 
> As promised, next chapter wraps up the H in H/C and provides a whole lotta C :)


	6. In the Past I Was Peaceful, Now I’m On Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there's oxygen deprivation, dramatic showdowns, some real stupidly fluffy fluff, and a fic writer slowly losing her mind when she can't figure out how to end this damn thing. Buckle up.

  
The thing was, you couldn’t actually feel it when a sealed room started losing air. That was part of the danger, the frog-in-the-boiling-water of it all. But worse now, because Booker _knew_ that the water was boiling, he just couldn’t jump out. And he really wanted out.

Nicky was still examining the wall, running his hands frantically along the lines, the corners, trying to find some weakness or trap door or magical stainless steel jackhammer that might help them get free. There was nothing, Booker knew there was nothing, knew _Nicky_ knew, but it didn’t matter. At least he was doing that, instead of standing there helplessly listening to Andy and Quynh argue like Booker was.

“It’s not like you’ll suffocate over and over again for hundreds of years,” Quynh pointed out in that perfectly reasonable tone. “This is so much easier. You can at least trust me on that, can’t you?”

“I don’t get ‘over and over again’ anymore, Quynh,” Andy glared at the speaker in lieu of glaring at her. “Pretty much a fucking one and done situation with me now.”

“How lucky for you,” Quynh hissed, and Booker couldn’t help but wince at the pain in her tone. Because he did know she was telling the truth, he’d felt it thousands of times in his sleep. “You won’t have to know what it’s like, to spend more time dying than living. Your lungs constantly flooded. Unable to breathe, to move, to think. For five hundred years.”

“We didn’t-”

“And then you finally get free of your prison, watching the damn thing rust around you for decades while you stay so pristine. Finally get free and see how the world has imploded and devolved around you. How men have only gotten worse. How the people who were supposed to love you didn’t find you, the people you cherished and cared for and protected with your life couldn't do the same. Couldn’t even _fix_ the thing that _killed_ you.”

He didn’t know who looked more stricken by that, Andy or Nicky. He didn’t know who he should go to, Andy who would just shove him away, Nicky who wouldn’t get anything from it until he knew Nile and Joe were okay. And so, Booker stood. Still. Helpless.

“And so you realize, if there is no curing it? Then you are damn well going to rule it. You are going to make it so no one can ever put you in a box again.” Quynh’s voice didn’t crack, because she was still tightly gripped in her self control, but the anger and pain and fear still leaked through so easily.

“And you don’t think we hate that?” Andy took an involuntary step closer to the speaker. “We hate ourselves? We tried, Quynh, we tried _so hard_ to find you, and it nearly…” she shook her head, took a steadier breath. “At least let them go.”

“Andy,” Nicky said sharply, turning to look at her, to share a worried glance with Booker.

“It was my decision to call off the search for you,” she was too calm now. That cold, blank calm she usually got when she used to talk about Quynh in the past, the one that had been missing the last few months. “It was on my order. Nicky and Joe would’ve kept looking, would’ve let me keep looking and killing myself and killing them. I killed them for you. I made them die a hundred times. I killed us for years, it’s on _me_. Let them go. I’ll stay. I'll die for you again, Quynh, right now. Please-”

“No,” she said simply.

Andy took another step closer. “They don’t deserve this, and you know it. All they’ve done is love us and love each other and follow me to every fucking corner of the earth to try and do good, and if that doesn't prove that there _are_ cures to the evil that took you, I-” Another gulp of air. Less steady. They were all breathing less steady, because Quynh was pulling the air out of the room.

Booker saw Nicky realize it at the same time he did and immediately go back to his task. There had to be a vent or vacuum seal or something removing the oxygen, and maybe it could-

“It’s not their fault I’ve fucked all this up, Quynh, let them go.” She looked awful, so much worse than she had when she’d found out that Booker had made the deal with Copley. Then, it had been pity, anger, disappointment in him, and it was maybe the worst he'd ever felt. (Which... was saying something.) But now, all that was directed at herself.

“Boss, shut up,” Booker tried next. She needed to conserve her air more than they did.

Andy whirled around to stare teary-eyed, anguished, at him, punch him (somewhat) weakly on the shoulder. “Why? Wouldn’t it make some part of this easier? Get it over with?” 

“Boss, shut the _fuck_ up,” he corrected himself. Because no.

She pushed at him, stalked away to the other side of the storeroom, turned back to look at him, at Nicky, at the speaker that had gone silent. (But she was still there, Booker could just tell. They all could.) “I finally get my head on straight after we lost her, I finally feel something again, but it’s just in time to leave you all?” She shook her head, but it looked like more to stave off dizziness that deny anything. “There’s still too much to do.”

“There’s always too much to do,” Nicky spoke so softly, but with real anguish. Real worry. “That’s not why we… We care about _you_ , Andy, not-”

“I’m leaving too much bullshit behind. No. I won’t be able to fix any of it before I die.” She leaned back against the far wall, knocked her head against it a few times, smiled painfully up at the ceiling. “You gonna tell me there isn’t a part of this that would be easier if I just got it over with before I become more of a liability? Mourn me quick and move on.”

Booker didn’t really know whether to hit her or start crying, so he did neither. He moved towards her because when wouldn’t he do that, when wouldn’t he let himself spin into her orbit? He had for two hundred years. She was right; he had followed her to every fucking corner of the earth, and he knew he’d do it again. Not because he had to, not because he was trapped in this immortal body and endless existence, but because of her. Because she… she was… she was… Booker shook his head, mirroring her movement. His thoughts were getting a little blurry. That was bad. That was...

Nicky was next to him, also closing in on Andy, escape forgotten. “We haven’t ever been able to move on from Quynh. Why would we from you?”

Andy slid down the wall to sit heavily on the ground, hand to her chest. “You don’t think that’s the worst of it, for me? Not that I’m going to die. Not even... that I’m going to leave you. But I’m going to put you all through _that_ again.”

“And you think being an asshole will magically make us stop loving you?” Booker rolled his eyes, immediately regretting it when he couldn’t quite get his balance back. He ended up on his knees, Nicky dropping down next to him, next to Andy. “You really…” A shallow breath. “Need to shut the fuck up, boss.”

Nicky grabbed Andy’s free hand, held it between both of his, pressed it to his forehead. “Quynh,” he called out, not as loud as he probably wanted, straining. “Quynh, please. I’m- I’m begging you. We can’t lose her this way.” Chest heaving to get more air in. “You can’t lose her this way either, I know you can’t.”

No answer. But they knew she was there. Booker moved in closer to the other two, stupidly trying to work out if he should hold his breath now, somehow use it later for CPR if he needed to. And he knew that didn't work, he knew his brain wasn't connecting laterally, everything muddy...

“Please,” Nicky tried again. “Whatever you want, I’ll do any-”

And then the wall farthest from them, the wall with the door and the speaker and no seams, suddenly exploded.

  
***

So drowning was a definite zero out of ten.

Waking up from drowning wasn’t that much fun either. Nile gasped painfully, coughing loud and rough, already panicking that coughing was a stupid thing to do, she’d be pulling in more water than air and fuck she was about to die again and Joe- Joe’s hand wasn’t moving against hers and they were going to-

She coughed again. And again. Kept coughing. Kept coughing _air_. 

Nile shoved herself up to sitting then leaned over, still racked with coughs. It felt like she was still filled with water, her lungs weighing her down and aching in her chest. “Shit-” more coughing. She tried to cover her mouth, press on her chest, but one hand was hampered by- “Shit, J-Joe…?”

He was lying next to her (on the deck of the boat? _how?_ ), their hands still joined by her belt. And he was very still. And she didn’t have the capacity for any more panic in her, but then- then Joe shuddered and rolled onto his side, coughing up water, wheezing on every rushed inhale.

“Joe?” she tried again, and remembering his words, remembering the focus, she grabbed his hand back into hers, relieved when he held on just as tightly. Joe gave the quick hand sign for ‘okay’ even as he stayed on his side, still spitting out water. Nile would’ve done something more, maybe something along the lines of demanding to know when they got magical powers to escape steel tanks, when a coat was placed around her shoulders.

She whirled… well, not all the way around, still sitting down and still tethered to Joe’s hand, but to the side at least. Copley was crouched down next to her, hands up and out peaceably. “You’re both alright?”

Nile stared. “You- you’re-?” They were on the deck, Nile told herself again. The boat hadn’t sunk, Joe had been right that just their ballast tank had been flooded. “You pulled us out?”

Copley looked a little sheepish, like he was worried she was about to lecture him about breaking protocols. “I lost your signals. Security cameras across the way showed you both going down below and not coming out. Then the explosions, I thought you might need me.” He eyed them both, breathing almost as hard as they were. Probably an adrenaline rush, she had no idea how much fieldwork he'd done in the CIA versus intel. “The hatches were all rigged to lock from the outside.”

“Quynh is very thorough,” Joe rolled onto his back, not even a wince when he landed on his sheath and scimitar. “The shipment was faked?” He gave Nile a smile as she finally undid the belt from around their wrists and they held hands for a firm second longer before letting go.

Copley winced. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Joe waved away his apology. “She’s very thorough.” He sat up, groaning a little at the water still dripping steadily out of his hair. “Never gonna get it dry,” he muttered. 

Nile gave him a commiserating grimace at that, the water she knew was trapped in her own hair ( _yeah,_ _it’s gonna be_ hours _, damn it_ ), and was amused to catch the knowing sympathy on Copley’s face as she turned to him. “The others?”

He shook his head. “I lost their signals as well, just before I made it here. They’re not on any of the boats, but something around here is causing the interference.”

“Somewhere sealed?” Joe guessed, tense and suddenly moving quicker.

“She’s doing the same thing to them?” Nile asked at the same time. Neither of them needed an answer, and she scrambled to her feet after Joe as he started for the ramp. 

Copley rushed to follow, “Wait, here, you need…” he had one of their spare weapons bags from the van. Joe took it with a nod and a smile- small, but genuine- and Nile was just about to be grateful for both the bag and the smile when Copley turned back to her. “They had your things stashed just outside the tank, I thought you’d want them back.”

And handed her the throwing knives.

Nile clutched them to her chest like a teddy bear. “Oh thank God.” Then promptly rolled her eyes at Joe’s slightly wider, slightly teasing grin. “Shut up.”

Joe shrugged in response, but his eyes were just as soft, knowing what they meant to her. He turned back to Copley. “You- you still have the tracker, don’t you?” Copley sobered immediately, nodded. “I don’t know enough about,” he waved a hand at nothing, “that stuff. Can you- can you hack it? Reverse it or take it over or-?”

“Use it to reflect the tracing signal and follow it back to the source?” Copley supplied, voice soft even as his eyes went hard and back into mission mode, already brainstorming codes and subroutines, probably.

Joe scrunched up one side of his face. “Sure. That. Yes. We’ll go find the others, if you-”

Nile caught on. “Can find Quynh’s getaway whatever transportation, it’s gotta be stashed somewhere ready to go-”

“Near the warehouses. I can plant the tracker,” Copley nodded again, then legit shooed them away with both hands like her uncle used to do, sending her and Kevin outside to the playground. “Go. Good luck.”

They got a few steps away from the docks, just splitting up, when Nile stopped. “James,” she called out quietly. “Thank you.”

His eyes might have widened at the use of his first name, but it was dark and he was still moving in the direction of the van. He might have smiled too. But she definitely caught the nod, the squared set of his shoulders. “Glad I could help.”

She followed Joe in the opposite direction, towards the warehouses, her substitute gun up and ready as Joe pulled his blade free. “How many of her guys are left?” she asked, doing a sweep and cover to the left as Joe took right. She’d counted at least ten bodies on the boat, the ones Joe had taken out to get to her, plus the four who’d been caught by the grenade.

“A handful?” Joe shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe?” 

“Is that the number you’re guessing or the amount of trouble you think they’ll give us?”

“Definitely not the latter,” he held up one hand, pointed to the warehouse two buildings down. Heavily fortified. Really heavily fortified for a mid-level marina in Poland. Alright then. Here we go. 

“The bigger trouble we’ll have is the fact that Andy, Nicky, and Booker are locked in a room together somewhere. You know there’s a chance they’ll kill each other before an hour’s even up, right?” She meant it as a joke, it was a joke, but the tiny little wobble to her voice and what it betrayed in her head wasn’t lost on her. Or Joe.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said quietly, pointing again, this time to the two men stationed outside the doors closest to them. She nodded, sighted her assault rifle, steadying herself with the weight of it, the confidence she could rely on in using it. “All of us are. In time, if maybe not before an hour’s up.”

“How do you know that? I thought this was all, like, unprecedented.” 

Joe’s hands and shoulders were steady, set, battle-ready, but for just a second she watched his eyes go somewhere far away. “It is. It is,” his voice wasn’t just soft for the stealth of it all, and Nile made sure to press her arm to his for a moment, maybe two. He came back to her, smiled again, leaned into the touch. “But it’s not the first time we’ve all been down at the same time. We come together in the end. We always do.”

“Unprecedented,” she reminded gently.

He kept the smile though. “Have you noticed Nicky has started making new drinks a part of his cooking routine?” She nodded- he’d been making smoothies and chilled fruity things and these weird sour, smoky-flavored things that Booker seemed to like… Oh. Joe nodded as soon as it hit her. “He’s trying to find things to distract from alcohol.”

“And?” Nile prompted, knowing this was going somewhere. For as much as Joe was known as a talker, he was also always purposeful in what he said. Everything meant something. Always.

And he seemed to know that’s what she was thinking, if the way he went a little bashful again meant anything. “Booker’s been hugging us- well, not everybody, sure, but you and me. He’s initiated them more than once lately, have you noticed that?”

She noticed _now_ , now that she thought about it, even as they ducked low and moved to the nearest corner near their targets, taking cover. “And Andy?”

He grinned. “Oh, she hasn’t stabbed any of us in like six _years_ , are you kidding?” When she smacked him on the shoulder, he softened again. “When she found Quynh standing over me by the river the other night, her first instinct was to protect me.” He shrugged, that painful self-deprecation he’d had lately coming back. “No matter what she- we- or, or everyone might be feeling right now, it’s not…”

“It’s not enough to break us,” she finished for him quietly

“Nothing can change this,” he gestured between them, then vaguely to where the others might be. “Our… us. This. We’re too…” he shook his head, and she felt that twinge in her chest again when he stuttered into silence. She leaned into him again, felt him breathe deep. “At the end of the day,” he tried again, speaking carefully, slowly, “We have each other.”

“Quynh changed, though,” she spoke just as carefully.

He pursed his lips, thinking. “I guess, yes. I think it's more that she _was_ changed. Her alone and tortured, it was something done to her. She’s been twisted up. But we're together, and she’s not the end of us. We already proved that.”

Nile frowned, trying to pull up the memory or moment of epiphany for that. “When?”

Joe nodded his head back the way they’d come. “She messed up. Thought we wouldn’t still be a team by this point. Your cell only had cuffs for one person. Her plan didn’t include you having backup.” The tiniest of shrugs. “She messed up.”

Nile almost laughed, remembering the bad guys at two o’clock just in time. Instead she tugged playfully at his shirt, still soaked and clinging to his skin. “Jesus, Joe, we’ve all be agonizing and torturing ourselves about, like, the band breaking up and thinking Quynh was winning. Except, apparently, you.”

His eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “So?”

“ _So_ ,” she emphasized, “We need that. You’re not the guy on the team whose emotions we have to put up with, got me? You give us all the permission, or- or, I don’t know, the outlet? To feel what we feel. Seems like that takes a lot of strength to me, something not all of us could handle doing. So maybe give yourself a break, huh Stitch?”

There was a little crinkle around his eyes at the nickname (there always was, it’s half the reason she did it), and yet he still seemed unsure. _Or sure of the wrong things._ “All of this started because Quynh was able to get to me. She targeted me first for a reason.”

“No,” Nile said firmly. “No. It all started when some dumb old white guys put her in the ocean. Not anything you did, or- you were right before- not anything even she did.” A quick glance to the warehouse, holding up five fingers until Joe nodded. “And anyway, she ended up getting to all of us, yeah? So if we’re all a weak link, then nobody is. The end.” And with that her five second warning was up, so she leaned around the corner and shot the two men guarding the doors. 

They moved together silently, approaching the building, waiting to see if there were any other marks in the way. And Nile maybe waiting to see if she’d overstepped there, or upset him further, or-

Joe stopped her just before they entered, leaned down and knocked his forehead against hers. “You’re my favorite person, you know,” he said it quietly, paused, then added much quieter and just on the silly side of sincere, “Don’t tell Nicky.”

She risked lowering her gun for a second, just long enough to pull him back down and kiss his forehead. Light and quick, like he’d done to her earlier. “I know that’s not true, but it’s an honor just to be nominated,” she smirked.

He smiled back, and it was light and quick too. “Pure starlight, Nile Freeman. Come on, let's go find something else to blow up.”

  
***  
  


To her oxygen-rattled brain, four voices suddenly popped and burst around her in a bright flash of sound and color, almost one on top of the other, and Andy knew she knew each voice, even though she couldn’t quite connect what the fuck was going on.

“See, that’s how you knock down a wall without getting stuck under it, _Joe_.” Nile?

“Was that my C4?” Book, Book was alive, he was okay.

“The last one wasn’t my fault!” That was Joe.

“Why are you all wet?” And Nicky.

But Andy, Andy said nothing. She took in a few deep breaths, getting as much oxygen as she could, pushing back the rush of adrenaline, euphoria, at being able to breathe…

And ran.

She tore out of the new hole in the storeroom, past Joe and Nile who looked okay if not thoroughly soaked to the bone, and she ran. Because Quynh would either be making one last grand move, or one last retreat. And Andy wasn’t going to let her do either.

She hauled herself up a flight of stairs to the side- Quynh would have gone for higher ground when they were trapped, would have been watching them from somewhere close by. She would be near the exits, a fire escape or a freight elevator or-

There were two flashes of movement, of sound. One ahead of her, ducking out a fire escape. The other behind, following her path. She recognized the gait, the sound of the boots, knew it was Joe. He'd probably taken off after her as soon as she'd run out. Andy pressed on, pushed herself harder, nearly throwing herself out the window, debating the merits of sliding down a decades-old fire escape to catch up with Quynh. Luckily logic won out, and as soon as Quynh landed on the ground and took off running again, Andy had her gun ready and fired.

Quynh took the shot to her knee and tried to roll with it, come back up running, but Andy fired again, took out the other one too. Jumped the last few feet down, hopefully hid the wince at the strain to her joints and the way it rattled her teeth, and approached her. Pulled her labrys free with her other hand, more for the comforting weight than for any threat. She paused, waited until she felt Joe catch up and position himself at her back, before fully turning to Quynh. 

It was a jarring, almost sickening, echo of the first time they'd met. Andy coming upon her collapsed on the ground, hair plastered to her face, eyes desperate and cagey, but hard. Like she planned to challenge and welcome death at the same time.

“I’ve never loved anyone like I love you,” she said plainly. Gestured to herself, as though her mortality was a mark that showed on her face, a scarlet letter. “Now I never will, I guess.”

Quynh’s teeth were bared, half in pain as her knees healed, half in pure defensive anger. Fury. “That means nothing to me.”

“Yes it does,” Joe spoke up quietly from behind.

“And you hate that right now, I guess,” Andy said thoughtfully. “You hate being tethered to that still.”

“I hate,” Quynh corrected her with a snarl, “being tethered to _you_. To all of you. You killed me. I'm ruined because of you.”

“We didn’t, Quynh. We lost you. But we still love-”

“Then you deserve everything that comes for you.”

“Is that what this was, then? Punishment?” Joe came a little closer. Andy didn’t turn to check, but hoped he had at least a gun out if not his blade. “For still being able to feel what seemed to make you go mad? Or because we want there to still be hope for you?”

Quynh’s eyes narrowed, and she pushed herself up to standing quickly, like a spring. Andy planted her feet, sensed Joe do the same behind her. But Quynh just stood her ground, glared at them both. She had a gun in her boot just like before, but they’d both be able to take her down before she reached it.

“I think you’re right, Joe,” Andy nodded, kept her eyes locked on Quynh’s. And refused to count the millions, maybe billions, of times she’d locked eyes with her before, over a campfire, during a battle, lying next to each other, laughing, weeping, determined, scared. Frenzied or calm, angered or loved. Every possible instance and emotion, they’d shared it together at some point. And she didn’t want to let herself believe (hope?) that she saw a flicker of that, of all of it, in Quynh’s eyes right now. “It’s not because we’re the biggest threat to her enterprise here. It’s because we’re the link back. To when she’d been real and good.”

“And as long as we’re around, we’re going to keep trying to get her back to that person again,” Joe phrased it almost as a question, somehow tentative and sure at the same time. Andy wished she could turn back to him, touch him like she really wanted to, like she should have the other night, like she should have before any of this shit got this bad.

Instead she nodded. For him and for Quynh to see. “Yeah. We are.” Lowering her voice a little, “I’m so fucking terrified, Quynh. That I’m going to die before we get you back. I’ve held onto that stupid fear for five hundred years, that I’ll never see you again. And it- it still might happen that way. I might never get to see the real you again before I’m in the ground.” Even softer. “That’s not what I want. I want you.”

Quynh flinched, looking away hurriedly as though she could hide it, hands clenching into fists as she straightened her spine. Andy mirrored the movement, on purpose, just in case she struck. She'd always been lightning fast, viper-like, and Andy didn't want to take any chances that she might- “Do you want to know the real reason why I took you first, Yusuf?”

He maybe flinched too, Andy swore she could almost hear it, so she spoke up for him. “Why?”

“Luck of the draw,” Quynh answered robotically, devoid of any of of her harder emotions, still not looking at them. It almost sounded like giving up. “It was random. When my team swept Merrick’s lab, the only traces of DNA research they recovered from the wipe was a sequence taken from you. That’s it. The only reason. It could have been any of you.”

“It- you…?” His voice was strangled, overwhelmed. Maybe disbelieving, but maybe desperate to believe it.

And Andy still couldn’t turn to him, still couldn’t let Quynh out of her sight. If she did, she might never see her again, and Andy couldn’t- 

But Quynh could see whatever was on his face, she had turned back to them, her eyes glassy at whatever she was seeing. She took a step closer, hand coming up as if to reach for him, to touch him, but both he and Andy tensed immediately, and she stepped between Joe and Quynh without a second thought. _Don't_.

Quynh just nodded, instead letting her hand reach for Andy, the pendant hanging from her neck. Andy held perfectly still and let her. Locked eyes with her again. Quynh blinked a few times, let a tear or two slip down her face. One finger pressed the pendant a little harder into her collarbone. “I don’t want to see you die, Andromache. I don’t want to be sad about it.”

Andy couldn’t even really get herself to blink. “And I don’t want you to disappear. Not now, not after everything, Quynh, you were _everything_ to m-”

Quynh pressed a little harder, pushing Andy back a step, shook her head. “I was never here to begin with. I'm not standing in front of you now. I'm still in the ocean, Andromache. I'm still drowned. I'm still dead and forgotten and surrounded by rust. A ghost of what was once good and real."

"You were never forgotten. You _are_ here, Quynh. Please be here."

She ignored her. "Most days I wake up thinking I can hear the water coming for me. Most nights I lay down waiting to feel it sweep up and crush me. I don’t want to think about death ever again. I don’t-” she looked at Andy, at Joe, past them both to where Andy was sure the rest of them were now standing, had been for awhile. “I don’t want to think about any of you ever again. I'd rather be the ghost.”

A harder push, and it wasn’t enough to knock Andy off balance, but Quynh’s words, the look on her face, had done enough of that anyway. She felt the air leave her lungs again, not suffocating like earlier, just a punch of empty nothingness in her chest. _No, Quynh, please. Don't make me watch you disappear again._

Quynh shook her head again like she’d heard Andy’s thoughts, took one, two, three steps backwards still facing Andy. Then she turned, and ran. Andy couldn’t have gone after her even if she’d wanted to. Couldn’t get her legs to move, couldn’t get her heart to beat, her lungs to draw breath, her-

A hand touched the small of her back, oh so lightly, not pushing or moving her. Just touching. She leaned back into it for a moment, just enough to get her balance, draw some of its strength into her own body, and turned his way.

Joe still looked a little rough, raw, a lot more tired, but not really as… lost, as he had been the last few months. A little steadier on his feet, maybe. He pulled his hand back with a nod, opening and closing his mouth, unable to find the right words.

Because there were none.

Instead he turned as Nicky came forward and went immediately to him, and it was almost like a contest to see who could envelop the other in his arms first. Joe pressed his lips to the side of Nicky’s face, then back to his ear, murmuring something softly to him. Nicky huffed a laugh at whatever it was, losing some of the tension in his shoulders, then pulled back and used his thumb to brush away errant drops of water still escaping from Joe’s hair.

Andy watched them. Joe’s words to Quynh were playing back in her mind, wondering if he was being punished for feeling what he did. Had she been doing that too? Like Quynh? Punishing them all for being the good thing in her life when all she wanted was-

“Andy?” Nile approached her carefully, Booker a step behind her after pausing to drape his jacket around Joe's shoulders, over his wet clothes. Nile was wearing one too, now that Andy thought about it, unfamiliar for just a second until her brain supplied the information. Copley. He'd been wearing it in the van earlier. Copley must have helped get them free from whatever trap Quynh had set for them.

Maybe Nicky was right that having the tech guy on hand wasn’t a bad idea.

“You alright, Andy?” Booker asked quietly, clasping her shoulder, holding on. The first time he’d called her Andy all day. Longer, probably. Longer, but she hadn’t been paying attention. He was trying to get her to meet his eyes, and for once it really did seem like the sadness that always clung to him was for _her_. Like he'd made progress in his own, like he was growing. Like he'd been managing his time growing and she'd been wasting her time shrinking. And Andy-

And Andy…

Andy pulled away. Gently, at least. As gently as she could. She wanted, she wanted so much, but not now, not yet. “We’ve made a lot of noise.”

Nile narrowed her eyes, opened her mouth like she was about to say something, more than something, more than Andy could handle, then she stopped. Schooled her face into something calm, battle-ready. “We should go before it starts getting light. Before any shift changes. And it’ll be easier for Copley to wipe any security cam footage if it’s all consistent and dark.”

“That’s right,” she murmured. It was scary how good Nile was getting at all this, and still able to retain her humanity, her spirit. _Maybe because she's had all of us here for her from the beginning_ , it sounded like Nicky’s voice in her head.

Yeah. Maybe.

  
***

  
Well, she’d done it. Nile had finally found the threshold that needed to be crossed for Nicky to give in and watch one of her animated movies. The last couple days had definitely earned her at least this much.

Not that he wasn’t taking advantage of it in his own way. He sat with them on the floor in front of the sofa, Nile positioned happily between him and Joe, Joe’s head resting on her shoulder, both of them bundled in extra layers and hair finally dry. Nicky had an arm reached out behind Nile to Joe, wrapping them both in it, his thumb rubbing slow circles into the back of Joe’s neck.

And he was sure it was a good movie, but admittedly, he was paying much more attention to the small but easy smile on Joe’s face as he hummed along to a song, already half-asleep. _And we’ll recall, when time runs out..._ “I like this one,” he said, just barely loud enough to be heard.

“The movie or the song?” Nicky asked, keeping his voice low too.

“Both. But I meant the song. The nice kind of sad.”

Nicky closed his eyes for a couple extra seconds, kept his breaths even as he hugged the two of them tighter to him. He opened his eyes to see Nile both casually and pointedly pull Joe’s hand into hers. “I can find some more songs from the composer,” she offered. 

“Hmm,” Joe nodded, his eyes pretty much closed at this point. He raised his free hand, wiggled his fingers at the television clumsily. “Shazam.”

He felt Nile’s little laugh. “That’s so outdated.”

And he felt Joe’s little smile. “Aren’t we all.”

Nicky cleared his throat, this time willing his eyes to remain open and clear and not overcome. He distracted himself by nudging at her. “So help me, Nile, if this one makes my husband cry like the movie about the song with the grandmother did…”

Nile’s smile grew into a grin, her face smoothing away of any distress for a while. “No worries, I’ve got it figured out. The next one we’re watching, I mean. Even you’ll have to love this one, Nicky, it’s all about cooking. And a… well, it’s a rat, not a mouse, but still.”

He rolled his eyes at her expression, at Joe’s undisguised delight on her other side. They really were spending entirely too much time together. He moved his hand to pinch Joe’s ear in retaliation, and purposefully kept his eyes on the two of them as he felt someone- Booker’s footsteps- approach from his left.

He could feel the hesitation, but gave nothing away as Booker sat on the floor next to him. Nicky turned back towards the television, making sure to knock their shoulders together and stay touching, maybe smiling a little as he felt Booker relax at that. 

Keeping his eyes on the screen, he reached over and patted Booker’s knee. “Is there one of your movies for Book?” he asked Nile.

She thought about it for a moment, seemed to come to an answer, then immediately seemed to change her mind (to keep the conversation light, Nicky would bet money on it). “Well, I mean, there is one about getting in touch with your inner self and processing your emotions…” She paused meaningfully, waiting for Booker’s reaction.

Which was to sigh- a little on the heavy side, on purpose- and lean back against the leg of the sofa. “I’m fairly certain we all need that one.”

“I will be offended by that later when I wake up,” Joe's pitch was at a mumble, eyes all the way closed and almost hidden in Nile’s shoulder.

Nicky snorted his laugh, twirling one of Joe’s curls around his finger. “You’ll forget in all of two minutes.” 

And was about to laugh again at Joe’s sleepy and maybe only half-joking, “Forget what?” when he heard the last pair of footsteps enter the room. Andy hovered in the doorway for second, leaning back like maybe she was going to duck out again, but then…

Booker nudged his shoulder ever so slightly, then leaned around him to talk to Nile, regaling her with the story of the time Joe slept through a tornado while the rest of them had been frantic, thinking he’d been swept away. Nicky listened less to the story he remembered all too well and more to the footsteps as they drew closer. No one reacted, no one drew attention to her or themselves, though Nicky could feel both Nile and Joe hold very still, even as Joe continued to drift on the edges of sleep and Nile laughed at Booker’s story. 

They were all waiting to see what would happen next. And probably, like Nicky, waiting to hear the footsteps go past them and go out the front door. Again.

But instead there was a sigh, soft, _nervous_ , and Andy climbed her way onto the sofa behind them. She sat cross-legged, very precise in her movement and placement. Held still, not saying a word, not touching any of them, just… sitting.

Nicky- as casually as he could- leaned his head back until it rested against her knee. And kept it there. There was another moment where everyone’s eyes were seemingly focused on a little robot on a television screen but everyone’s awareness was focused on the person sitting above them, behind them, but… but _with_ them, at least. She was _here_. 

And then she reached down to Nicky’s hand curled around the back of Joe’s neck and laid hers over it, held it there for a bit. Nicky allowed himself a small smile as he felt more than saw Joe relax against Nile’s shoulder again. Let the smile grow a little as her hand then went up to ruffle at Joe’s hair, comb through and work out a few tangles. 

It wasn’t always about words, it didn’t have to be. Not with them. They’d all just wanted Andy to be there with them.

And now, Nicky had to believe, wanted to believe, _did_ believe, she was making her way back.

He smiled, and he closed his eyes. Just to savor it, just for a minute. But when he opened them again it was sometime later and the room was dark, lit only by the moonlight streaming in one window and the DVD menu on the television screen. It was dark and quiet and calm, and Nicky savored that as well, something like real peace settled around them all for maybe the first time in a year. Longer? Maybe longer.

He surveyed the room while keeping as still as possible, especially considering the slightly precarious position he was in. Booker was asleep next to him, still leaning into Nicky’s left arm, an empty bottle of water in his lap. Andy had stretched herself out horizontal on the couch, her knee still managing to prop up Nicky’s head, one of her hands draped lightly on Nile’s shoulder.

Nile herself had ended up with her head on Nicky’s shoulder, one arm threaded through his, her other hand tangled up in the sleeve of Joe’s sweater, holding on. Joe was curled into Nile still, but one of his legs was stretched out over hers to rest on Nicky’s ankle. It was an echo of his old ways, the relaxed sprawl he employed to such great effect (on Nicky, at least), and he was grateful to see a sign of it coming back. 

He knew things weren’t magically fixed- he knew better than most anyone in the history of this planet that these things took time- but to finally feel like they were all headed in the right direction, and all in that direction together? It was… it was…

Nicky blinked away the moisture in his eyes and decided to blame part of it on the glare from the television. Ever so slowly, carefully, he tried to extricate himself from the huddle, but all it took was one half-aborted twitch from a cramped muscle and (most of) the others began to stir too.

Booker spent the first few seconds of waking up as he always did- grumbling about the bad back he didn’t actually have. Nile was sleep-clumsy in her attempts to get to her feet, patting Joe’s hair absentmindedly when he frowned at the loss of his pillow. She waved a good night to them and stumbled a bit on her way to the stairs. Nicky got up to help her or, or something, he wasn’t quite sure really, but stopped. Booker was making his way up as well, and Nicky trusted him to get Nile safely up the stairs.

And it took him a few seconds after that to realize what he'd just thought- instinctively- and to realize it was true. _Moving in the right direction_ , he reminded himself.

He turned back in time to see Andy grabbing at one of Joe’s outstretched hands, pulling him up to sit next to her on the sofa. Nicky stayed where he was, watching as Joe refused to let go of her hand, held it in his to study her knuckles, the newfound scars and slight wrinkles of skin that hadn’t been there until recently. Sighed, held the hand to his chest, over his heart. Nicky watched as Andy smiled a little painfully, leaned in and kissed the top of his head, murmuring something into his hair that only Joe could hear. He waited for Joe’s nod to whatever she’d said, the half-smile he gave her in return, before moving closer.

Joe looked up, the half-smile growing full, reaching out with both hands to grab at the air in his direction. Nicky allowed his own smile to widen, coming over to join them on the sofa, keeping his arms slightly out from his body so Joe had the room there to burrow in and latch on, wrap himself up around Nicky’s torso. In turn, he slung one arm low around Joe’s back to keep him in place and laid his other across the back of the sofa, resting his hand on Andy’s shoulder. 

She tilted her head to rest her cheek against his hand. Her eyes were soft as she looked over the both of them, settled on Nicky. He looked back, and even though she could always see through him anyway, he dropped his guard a bit more, hoping his eyes conveyed everything he wasn’t sure there were words for. How much he loved her, how much he still had hope for her, for all of them- even Quynh, possibly- how he’d never stop following her, fighting for her.

She smiled, nodded, reflected it right back at him, her cheek a little damp against his hand. After a few minutes of silence between the three of them, letting everything settle, she closed her eyes. “I could never doubt either of you. I need you to know that.” 

Nicky squeezed her shoulder, felt Joe turn a bit from where he’d had his face buried in Nicky’s ribs so he could see her. “We know.”

“I really need you to know that,” she insisted anyway. “I’ve never doubted. Even before I’d ever met you, I never doubted.” She smiled again. “Did I ever tell you about the last time Quynh and I dreamt of you?”

Nicky lifted his arm as Joe sat up some to face her and lean against Nicky’s chest instead, dropping it back down to hug him close just in case as he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“It wasn’t a vision-y one,” she gestured to her eyes. “It wasn’t a lot of images. Just the two of you sitting together somewhere. Holding hands, maybe, I don’t really remember that as much as… It was the feeling, the emotions we got. Safety. Love. Strength. And… and rightness. Righteousness, maybe. It was…” she gripped Nicky’s hand on her shoulder tightly. “It was the first time in a long time both of us woke up smiling. She was so excited. ‘One of them cooks,’ she said. ‘One of them’s a poet.’” Her other hand on Joe’s knee. “We found you the next day.”

“ _We_ found _you_ ,” Nicky corrected, dry and deadpan, the old argument surfacing once more.

“We would’ve found you first if it hadn’t been for the mud slide, shut up,” she shot back.

Joe groaned, rubbing a hand against the side of his face tiredly. “So much mud.”

“It used to be hard adjusting to other people,” Andy said after a moment of silence to commiserate. It really had been so much mud. “By myself for so long, thousands of years, to suddenly have someone with me? Not just fighting, but… but living? I wasn’t- I wasn’t good at it, at first. Was pretty much against it.”

Nicky felt a lump in his throat, and simultaneously felt Joe press into him harder, not letting him wallow or self-recriminate about his own mental state after death. And so he focused instead on what he had now, rested his chin on top of Joe’s head, pressed back.

Andy saw it all, of course she did, kept her hold on both of them. “And then Quynh became everything to me, and then Lykon came to us, and having to adjust to a group? Even harder. I hated it at first, until I loved him, then hated myself for hating _any_ of it when we lost him.”

“There’s logic in all of that, Andy,” Nicky said softly. “You know that.” 

He felt Joe nod in agreement. “What etiquette could have possibly even been in place before your life to dictate the right or wrong ways to feel about all of this?”

She rolled her eyes at both of them affectionately. “I know that.” A shrug, amending, “I know that _now_. I’m just telling you so you know what it meant that I wasn’t suspicious about you two joining us. I wasn’t apprehensive.” She pulled part of the cuff of Nicky’s sleeve in between two fingers, playing with it idly. “We’d been dreaming about you for awhile at that point, thirty, forty-some years. But that last one, you two were…” she ducked her head. “You were looking forward to finding us. Joining with us. Your minds had been made up. About me. I still can’t believe it sometimes, how you two had faith in me from the beginning, from _before_ the beginning.” 

“You’d already earned it, boss,” he could hear Joe’s smile offered up in the words, could tell his eyes were bright and sincere. “We learned everything we needed to about your heart from those dreams too, don’t forget. How could we doubt something we already knew was true?”

She reached out and took Joe’s hand into her, grabbed Nicky’s with the other, pulling until they were both leaning over closer to her. “I promise you both,” she was firm now, the Boss, their general. “I am going to do everything in whatever power I have left to make sure you never doubt yourselves like she made you.”

“Andy-”

“No,” she cut Nicky off. “You think you shouldn’t get that same faith back? What you gave me? Bullshit. You should. I may need to smack you both in the head occasionally, but fuck anyone who tries to take away what you’ve both earned. I-” her voice cracked, just a little. “I love you both so much, and no one- not even her- gets to hurt you like that.” Another stutter to her breath. “She was calling you our brothers before we even knew where to look for you. Before we even knew your names.”

Joe’s turn to shudder in his breathing, and Nicky just barely resisted the urge to hide his face in Joe’s hair, his shoulder, his neck, something. Because he honestly didn’t know how to feel about Quynh right now, and knew even less what his face might be broadcasting to Andy. 

He couldn’t even really tell what her face was broadcasting back to him.

“What do you want to do?” she surprised him by asking them. “Whatever you two want me to do, I’ll do it.”

“About Quynh?” Nicky had to ask, because he wasn’t sure, because he knew Joe wouldn’t ask, not right now or right yet.

“About anything,” she replied. “Her, yes. But us too. Us here, Book, Nile. What do you want to do?”

Joe leaned to the side a little and tilted his head, caught Nicky’s gaze, and raised an eyebrow. Nicky saw the question there- _What do you think?_ \- and nodded for him to turn back to Andy- _You pick._ Joe accepted it, knocked his forehead against Nicky’s chin, and took a deep breath as he looked back to her. “I want us to stay together,” he finally said, simple and solid.

Nicky did duck his head down this time, hiding the no doubt helplessly-in-love smile on his face. “I don’t think that’s in question, Yusuf.”

Joe shook his head, undeterred. “No breaks, Andy. No taking time off. We need to work out these problems together now. We're sharing as much of this weight on your shoulders you've insisted on carrying alone, as much as we can. Yes?”

She was smiling too, nodding her head in acknowledgment. “Yes, Joe.”

“We should pick one place to settle down for awhile. At least a year, two would be better. Nile needs stability,” he continued. He rubbed a hand down the side of his face, across his mouth, down his beard- the tic he only did when he was deep in his head, deep in thought. “Somewhere we can get to small jobs as they come up. Tell Copley.” Another turn to look up at Nicky. “He was very good on this one. We should think about having him close by more often.”

Nicky mirrored him by tilting his head down to kiss him quickly. “We should talk to him first, but yes, I think so too.”

They both turned back to Andy, who was smiling wider, if a little bittersweet. “You guys are gonna be good at this, when the time comes.”

It… it didn’t actually _hurt_ , was the thing. But Nicky felt the words, the implication, the reality of what would eventually have to happen, unfold in his chest. And he knew from the way Joe gripped him tighter that he was feeling the same. “Andy…”

“I know, I know,” she let go of them both, rubbing at her neck, her shoulder. “It’s not time for that conversation yet. I’m just telling you what I think.”

He cleared his throat, waiting for his lungs to settle before venturing out with, “What do we do about Quynh?” Felt his own grip tighten on Joe without meaning to. “Do you believe her, that she doesn’t want anything to do with us now?”

Silence again. Andy kept rubbing her shoulder, the one that had started bothering her recently, especially before it rained. Nicky made a note to grab some ice packs before she went to sleep, and check the weather report before they went out tomorrow. 

Joe shifted his upper body, not quite tense, not quite restless, but unsettled. Nicky slid one hand around and down Joe’s arm, let him capture it and tangle their fingers together, the long fingers of Joe’s other hand tracing patterns onto his skin, his palm, his wrist. Like he needed to draw with whatever he could, that calming way of pouring out what was inside.

When Andy spoke, it felt like a weary acceptance coming forward and speaking for her. “I believe she believes it. For now, at least. For awhile. I, uh,” she glanced at them, seeming to weigh her options on whether to say whatever was on her mind, then, “I don’t really know if _I’ll_ ever see her again.”

“She’s scared of it too,” Joe was mostly thinking out loud, Nicky could tell, at an almost-whisper. “Death. Unimaginable torture couldn’t bring her to it. And yet now it does come for you.” He frowned down at where his and Nicky’s hands were joined together. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get our Quynh back, if she’ll ever be able to stomach being near us again. Maybe she will. But I also don’t think the next time we see her, she’ll be on the other side of the battlefield. She's twisted up, but knots unravel, given enough time. We all eventually choose to come back to what's right, after all.”

Andy reached out to lay a hand over theirs. “Pretty optimistic look on life.”

He shrugged, still looking down. “A thousand years, never been given any evidence to the contrary.”

_Yes you have, you have, you have a thousand times over, you’re just too good for most everything in this world_ , Nicky felt like climbing back up to that spot on the rooftop and shouting it from there. He settled for the next best thing, closing his eyes and pressing his face into the back of Joe’s neck, wishing he could curl around Joe for eternity, his shoulders covering Joe’s shoulders, his arms around Joe’s arms, his body between Joe’s and every hurt that might come at them.

“So you really don’t think she’s a danger anymore?” Andy asked him, or Nicky, or both of them.

But it seemed like Joe was done talking, having used up all the words he could muster after months of hesitations and stutters, like it was a muscle he hadn’t worked in too long. He shrugged instead, more of his weight leaning into Nicky’s arms and chest. Nicky kissed him again, then looked to Andy. “Copley is tracking her now. Let that be enough.”

For now, at least. Let it be enough. Their lost sister was alive and on solid ground, physically if not emotionally. The person who had spent months actively trying to hurt and kill them had given up and retreated.

Even if it still hurt that they were the same person, at least some small, wretched chapters in their lives were over.

Andy studied them both again, looking them over like she was checking for injuries. Nicky hoped she could see that what was there was healing. She found a tremulous half-smile for them. “I wouldn’t blame you, neither would they, if you did want to go away for a bit, just the two of you. Just to spend some time-”

Joe tensed in his arms, and Nicky felt himself do the same, cutting her off with a sharp shake to his head. “We don’t want to.”

And they relaxed again as soon as she did, immediate and sinking down with relief. “Good,” was all she said. 

But the question was still there, in her eyes, and Nicky couldn’t have that. “Do you know what kept us sane- unified- after those first few years? What led us to, to what we are to each other now?”

“What?” she asked, smiling again, but this time like she was ready to be fondly annoyed with them. Like she was about to smack them on the back of the head or twist their ears for flirting too much at the breakfast table. A much more favorable default for all three of them.

“Because we realized,” Nicky let his tone be a little dramatic, a little playful, grandstanding, “that together, we’re better than we ever could have been apart.”

“Still true,” Joe picked up where he left off. “It will always be true, boss. It’s the reason for all of this, for how we stay good. And real. Our bonds with each other. How we become better versions of ourselves, how we keep from slipping into the dark.”

And maybe she rolled her eyes, but maybe those eyes were a little happy too. She shook her head, then stood up from the sofa, leaned over and kissed each of them on the cheek. And with a soft murmur of, “Good night, boys,” she smiled again and headed off to the stairs and a hopefully peaceful sleep.

And they were alone and together, as they’d been so many times before. Nicky didn’t try to move, didn’t try to find a more comfortable position or shift Joe into a better spot. They stayed where they were, breathing in and out with the silence and occasional creaks of the house settling around them. And Nicky let himself settle too.

“I just realized something,” Joe said then, still so quiet, his hands having folded in and around Nicky’s so much that he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. He’d pulled them up to rest against his chest, pulling Nicky in and around _him_.

“What’s that?” he dropped his mouth down to rest on top of Joe’s shoulder, closed, just breathing him in. They were swaying a little in the embrace, he realized. To no beat or music. Just to each other.

And he could feel Joe’s smile. “I love you more today than yesterday.”

He took a beat, hearing the words, letting Joe know he was hearing the words, and then moved. Threading the needle between swift and gentle, he slid out from behind Joe, letting him drop to lie flat on the sofa. Then he laid himself on top, using both elbows on either side of Joe’s head to prop himself up, and look down at him with a smile.

It was either that or combust. This was better. “And tomorrow?”

Joe looked up at him with wide, grateful eyes. Eyes with that shone with elation, too. With love. His hands had already started to move, wrapping around each jut of Nick’s hips and holding on. “Tomorrow?” Steady hands, slowly, confidently dipping down a little lower, below his waistband. “Tomorrow, Nicolò, I’ll love you more than ever.” One foot hooking over the back of his leg, a heel digging in playfully but with purpose. “Today, yesterday, all yesterdays before? Nothing compared to tomorrow, I promise you.”

Nicky laughed, just a little, the quiet, ungainly laugh he knew was Joe’s secret favorite- the ridiculous laugh for Joe's ridiculous words- and closed his eyes. He didn’t need them, he could map the entirety of Joe’s body blindfolded if he wanted to. He proved it now just because- with one arm still holding him up, that hand gripping at Joe’s hair lightly, he slipped the other under Joe’s shirt, flat against his skin, sweeping his thumb back and forth low across his stomach. 

Joe leaned up to meet him halfway, before Nicky even realized he himself was leaning down. But if moving towards Joe was instinctive, pure muscle memory, then kissing Joe was an marked experience to be savored every time. It was a symphony, a sunrise, a perfect moment with the perfect person. He kissed him with the sort of languid pleasure they always tried to make the time for, the kind that rolled through his entire body, head to toe, the kind that- by the time they came up for air- had them aligned like stars and planets- their mouths, their hips, his knees between Joe's, nudging his legs just that little bit farther apart. 

“Looking forward to tomorrow, then.” Moved his hand up Joe’s chest, pressing against the steady, thumping heartbeat. Nicky broke away just so he could kiss him there, that most important thing in Nicky's long, long life. _My heart._

"You better." And- with the conviction that could only come from a man who’d lived through a thousand years of war and death and somehow still couldn’t find the evidence to believe in anything other than hope, love, _us_ \- Joe smiled up at him again, open and unguarded. “It's going to be a good day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't fucking know, guys, I couldn't think of a good final line, _nothing_ was coming to me that sounded right, so I just kept writing that final scene longer and longer and longer and longer until my fingers were whittled down to tiny dry bones clacking on a keyboard. Hoo boy. A healthy dose of saccharine there, yep?
> 
> BUT ANYWAY. This space is supposed to be reserved for _you_ , not me. Thank you to every every every kudo and comment and anyone who just read, I really love and appreciate it all so much. For real. See you in the next story? Hope so!


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